


we should rip it straight out

by minormendings



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fix-It, Getting Back Together, Getting Together, M/M, Not Treasure Island Compliant, POV Alternating, Post-Canon, Silver And Flint Have Two Hands, and silver lives in both of their heads rent free, assaults on british warships as a love language, but none of us are here for treasure island compliant are we, knives as a metaphor for how fucking hard these people are to love, this is really about madi and flint but there's a rotating cast in the background, thomas and madi have one hand but they're supportive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:07:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 44,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24618847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minormendings/pseuds/minormendings
Summary: Madi has always wondered if Silver understands what is between him and Flint as well as she. To her, it has always been obvious, from the way the two of them had fit together, had worried about each other, had acted as one. She had tried to bring it up with Silver back when they were together. But Silver had shaken her off, too enmired in the idea that he or Flint would prove each other’s downfall. Or perhaps just unwilling to open his eyes to the fact that he had loved Flint.It was, unfortunately for the both of them, even more obvious after the thing between them had broken. Just as Silver had thrown away the war out of love for her, Flint had let Silver take away the war rather than kill him.God. What a group the three of them were, showing love by betrayal.Post-canon. Madi and Flint find their way back to Silver.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/John Silver, Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton, Madi/John Silver
Comments: 66
Kudos: 136





	1. XXXIX

**Author's Note:**

> I know I'm three years late to write fix-it--I'm late on the bandwagon, but this show owns my heart now, what can I say?
> 
> Canon compliant until the end of 4x10, with the change being that Flint is held in a cell in Port Royal instead of being shipped straight to Savannah, and Thomas is on the ship that's supposed to bring Flint to Savannah. I wrote this to figure out for myself how Madi and Flint come to forgive Silver, and what their lives are like as they find a balance between domesticity and all-out war. Also, please take any historical details here with a grain of salt--some I googled obsessively and some I said “eh, it’s fanfiction, I do what I want.” Title from Bastille’s “Fake It” because I'm predictable.
> 
> Warning for canon-typical mentions of slavery, with a focus on efforts by Madi, Julius, and others to free the enslaved people held on New Providence Island rather than depictions of slavery itself.

_“You will need to get Thomas Hamilton from Savannah before you attempt to bring Mr. McGraw to the plantation,” John Silver tells the man before him. “If he doesn’t know beyond doubt that Mr. Hamilton is alive and waiting for him there, he’ll fight you all the way to Savannah. Better to collect Mr. Hamilton first so that they can travel together back to Savannah. To ensure that Mr. McGraw remains. . . tractable.”_

_The man nods and makes his exit. Silver sags to the desk, the effort of attempting to remain professional and detached leaving him feeling like he’s been running for miles._

All these lies, _he thinks tiredly_. At least there will only be a few more. And at least they’re all in service of making sure that Flint knows I’m not lying about _this_. And with any luck, of bringing him back. 

—

The first day of the second life of James McGraw is full of blinding joy. When James first catches sight of Thomas on the deck of the British frigate _Ladysmith_ , he feels something settle in his soul that has been missing for ten long years. Thomas is _alive_ , Thomas is with him, Thomas is here on this very ship in Port Royal. No amount of locks or chains or armed men surrounding them can keep him from feeling whole again, can keep him from burying his face in Thomas’s shoulder as Thomas wraps him in his arms. When Thomas pulls back gently, James doesn’t even hesitate to kiss him. _What are they going to do_ , the small part of his brain that still registers the guards around him asks archly, _sentence me to a second lifetime in jail?_

The second day of the second life of James McGraw is—well. James has spent the last ten months in a cell, a man with no name, and the previous ten years waging war. Small wonder if his emotional state is on a bit of a pendulum. And at the moment, the pendulum has swung in a direction that has him curled into a ball on the narrow cot in their locked cabin, vainly attempting to muffle his sobs. 

James hears Thomas draw closer to the cot, feels Thomas’s warmth against his back as he perches on the edge of the cot and lays a large hand gently on his shoulder. “James, love, tell me what you need from me,” says Thomas gently. “Do you want to talk about it?”

James’ mouth shapes the word “no,” but he can’t seem to get it out. A half-sob falls from his mouth instead. He knows he should be embarrassed, he knows he should feel guilty for worrying Thomas when he should be uncomplicatedly over the moon to have Thomas back, but he can’t seem to act out the proper emotions when his world has upended itself so completely in a matter of weeks. Just a short while ago, Thomas was dead and Flint was finally going to exact some appreciable measure of revenge for it. He had a man he trusted and understood at his back, and a woman who he respected more than anyone in the world alongside him. Now, that man had betrayed him, that woman is lost to them both, that war has been snatched from him. Yesterday, James had celebrated what was returned to him, but today all that he has lost comes back. 

Thomas swings his legs up onto the bed with a slight groan and plasters himself against James’ back, holding him as his tears subside, first into shaking and then into stillness. “I do want to tell you about it,” James says eventually, still staring at the wall. “Did they tell you how I came to be here?”

“Some,” Thomas answers. His breath is warm on the back of James’ neck when he speaks. It settles James somehow; it's proof that Thomas still breathes. “They told me you were a pirate. More than a pirate. They told me you took up arms against England, that you and Edward Teach and a colony of maroons tried to take Nassau from her.”

James laughs softly. “Me and Teach? Is that what they say?”

“I don’t know about _they_ , but that’s what I heard. And they told me”— Thomas pauses, shifts against James—“that your capture stopped the war.”

“That much is true,” James tells him quietly. “But it seems to me they left out the most important characters when they told you my story.”

“And who are they?”

“Madi.” He swallows, feeling contented at the memory of her, not wishing to continue. But he must. “And _Silver_.”

That word is somewhere between a sigh and a hiss. Just saying the name brings up visceral memories of the man: looking impossibly young and golden in the Bahamian sunlight as he flashed a desperate, white-teethed smile at Flint, looking deadly as a lightning strike with a sword in his hand in Nassau Town, looking bent beneath the sadness of the world as he aimed a pistol at Flint in the forest. _We might even be friends by then_ , he’d told Flint a century ago. How little either of them could have known exactly what they would become to each other in that moment. 

James sighs. “Silver was the little shit who stole from me, then he was my co-conspirator, then my friend. And then he took my war away from me and sent me here.” Jesus, that was a far cry from _Let me tell you a story about a Spaniard named Vasquez_. Had Silver taken even his ability to spin the kind of tale that men would fight and die over?

Maybe not. Maybe James simply has no desire for Thomas to hear anything but the barest, clearest truth. 

“I’m sorry,” James says thickly. “I know this isn’t what you deserve. Me, getting you back and then being a mess about it.”

“It’s not about what I deserve. It’s about what you need right now. You’ve taken care of my needs and you’ll do so again, so if what you need today is to tell me your story, that’s what you can do.”

So James does. He fills in the blanks, not of all ten years apart, but of what he can bear to talk about today, what he must talk about today. He tells Thomas about the war and the men who fought it, unknowingly, in his name. He tells Thomas about Madi, smiling as he thinks of her. And he tells Thomas about Silver, talking in circles around Silver over and over, through omissions in the story that are too painful to think of, through parts of the story that must be said out loud before he bursts with them.

When he is finished, he rolls over in Thomas’s arms and kisses him gently, reminding himself that Thomas is what he has now, even if he is _all_ he has now. But Thomas’s mind seems to be in a wholly different place.

“You sound like two sides of the same coin. You and Silver.”

“Three sides,” James corrects. “Madi was just as necessary to us as each other.”

“A strange coin, then.” Thomas’s mouth curves into a warm smile.

“It’s true, though. Madi and I saw eye to eye on our ideals, but not on our methods. Silver and I agreed on what must be done to achieve our goals, but he didn’t have the same idealism as Madi. He and Madi. . . well. They were just in love. That can erase differences for as long as it lasts.” 

He pauses, wondering at the slight sourness to his own tone. Then—

“You loved him, didn’t you?” Thomas asks. 

His tone is thoughtful and curious, kind rather than accusing, but James stiffens anyway. “I—”

“It’s all right if you loved him,” Thomas says. He kisses James again, very softly. 

Is it? It doesn’t feel all right to love Silver. It feels like a knife in his chest. Like it would kill him quickly to acknowledge and remove it, even as it is killing him slowly now. 

Before he can overthink it, he buries his face in the curve of Thomas’s neck and says, “Jesus. He made it so difficult to love him.” _To love him._ Even that oblique admission feels like twisting the knife. “You know when I first realized I saw him that way? Right after he told me that he’d cheated me out of the Urca gold.”

Thomas laughs slightly, his breath ruffling James’ short hair. Without even looking up, James can picture Thomas when he laughs like that—his eyes crinkling, his smile unbearably kind. Thank God or whoever else is out there for Thomas, who can smile at this, who is never jealous.

“And even after that . . .” James sighs. “After we’d learned to trust each other, to need each other, it was difficult. Even beyond the politics of it, the way it would’ve affected the crew . . . I think he just couldn’t acknowledge it out loud. What we were to each other. Even after he knew everything about me, he could never reveal anything of himself. It was like he could bear to look at anything, no matter how dark, but he could never bear to be looked at.”

Thomas wraps an arm tighter around him and lets the moment hang. Then he says, “I can think of someone else who was like that.”

“What? You can _not_.”

“I can! Well, not the scheming and stealing part. But being in love with someone who doesn’t yet have the language to love me back—that much I am certainly familiar with.”

“Maybe,” James says grumpily. He’s reluctant to let the difficulties in loving him be put on a level with the difficulties in loving _Silver_. “But I never betrayed you. I never unmade you.”

“Unmade you?” Thomas asks.

“That’s the word Silver used.” James lets out a slow breath, turning the word over in his mind. _Unmade_. “He took away Flint. The legend I had built up around Flint. The anger that fueled him. The fights he would have fought to the death. Silver changed me back into McGraw and sent me to you.”

Thomas laughs, sudden and loud in the small space. He looks like he can’t help it, his face breaking into pure joy, his knees clenching in towards his chest in the grip of it.

“What?” James asks, half-smiling, half annoyed. “What’s so funny?”

“He thought only Flint was the fighter? Love, remember when you started a tavern brawl to defend my honor when you were still, definitely, Lieutenant McGraw?”

“Perhaps I do recall something of that nature,” James says, still guarded but matching Thomas’s teasing. 

But Thomas’s face turns serious again, and he isn’t through. “Remember when you backed me in an unwinnable fight against Parliament and the crown because you thought it was the right thing to do? Remember when, as you just told me, you lived peaceably with my wife on an island full of pirates and thieves? Remember how you fought in my name then too? How you loved, when you went by Flint? Darling, it seems to me that Flint and McGraw are one in the same. You had some Flint in you when I first met you, and you will have him again, or you will be only half the man I know you to be.”

A little helplessly, James replies, “But you don’t know all I have done. I have spared you some of—I have killed —”

Thomas shuts him up with another kiss. “I know. I know. You were a pirate, you were a warrior, I know what you’ve done. And I don’t care. You think _I’m_ the same man you knew? God, I think the man you knew was an idealistic, sheltered fool most of the time. I have seen things that would have made me understand the urge to fight back, to—to take out a piece of England, ten times over.”

James swallows. How to tell Thomas all the times he hated Flint’s name, hated the things he did when he wore it? How to tell Thomas that even so, he felt like only half a man when he tried to deny the side of him that was Flint?

Heavy footsteps clump down the narrow hall outside, and the lock rattles at the door. The door swings open to reveal a man, short but thickly muscled, his head shaven. Familiar, but James has to reach way back in his memory to realize why. 

The man stares at James, eyes unblinking as he takes in the way Thomas’s arm curves around him, and sets a tray of food on the floor. 

Recognition of the man sparks something in James, the ghost of an idea. “Cooper. Isn’t that right?” he asks. The man nods warily. “May I ask who captains this ship?” 

Cooper gives him an appraising glance before answering. “Captain Robert Medlan. Came in with Rogers’ men.”

“Thank you, Cooper,” says James, using the inflection that told men _well done, your captain is dismissing you_. Cooper turns on his heel to leave, double-time, as if to obey the implicit order. James allows himself a small smile at this even as Cooper turns the lock once more. 

“What was that about?” Thomas asks.

“Cooper. I knew him from my first ship in Nassau, back before I got my command. A brawler, that one. Short fuse. He wanted to go after every prize we passed, no matter how heavily armed, and he’d pick fights over how big his rum ration was, whether he thought someone had looked at him funny, anything.”

“So?”

“So I’ll imagine he won’t take kindly to Medlan. Him, I knew in the Navy.” James feels himself slipping back toward something he’d thought had been taken from him, feels himself trying to sell Thomas on this plan before it’s even fully formed. “An inflexible man, and as tightfisted as they come. Lashings for anyone who he thought didn’t uphold the Navy’s good name, and he wouldn’t pay anyone for their previous voyage until they were setting sail for their next one, to stop his men running off.” Gears are turning in James’ head. How many of Nassau’s pirates had been deserters and mutineers from respectable sailing operations? The kind of respectable sailing operations that paid a pittance, were quick with the whip, and would hang a man for disagreeing with his captain? How many of them would rest easy returning to such a life?

“So they have former pirates sailing under a respectable man,” muses Thomas.

“And respectable sailors as well, I noticed when I came aboard.” James curses himself for feeling sorry for himself instead of paying more attention when he was brought aboard. “Probably mixed the crews from Nassau and—well, the new Nassau. A show of good faith. It’s what I would have done.” 

“What Flint would have done?” asks Thomas gently. 

James feels his expression turn sour. “Maybe. Maybe I’m thinking like him again. Maybe I should put him aside and —”

“And what, James?” New tension thrums in Thomas’s voice as he stands. “Let yourself be carried off to the plantation and shut away forever? And it’ll all be fine, because you have me? Because let me tell you, James, it is better than Bedlam, but it is no holiday. It is work, all day in the sun, with no freedom to come and go, no freedom to read, to think, to visit whom you like. It’s no life for you. For us.”

Jesus. Has it really been so long since he’d known Thomas, that he’d thought, even for a second, that Thomas would accept an injustice like this? Accept an injustice against _him_? “I’m sorry. You’re right,” James tells him. “I’m sorry for. . . ” He trails off. He feels like he stands at the edge of a precipice, like he’s hauling Flint back up from the depths. 

Or preparing to meet him there. 

“I can get us out of this, love,” he tells Thomas softly. “But you’ll have to help me figure out what comes next.”

—

The next time Cooper opens the door to bring a meal, James is ready. 

As Thomas perches on the bed, looking placid but with his hands balled into fists, James stands at the narrow window. He tries to look busy and at attention, as if he was interrupted at work at the captain’s desk rather than posing for effect in a makeshift jail cell.

“Ah, Cooper,” James says brusquely, without turning from the window. He winces to himself—that felt unnatural. When he was captain, how did he stand? Like this? Was this the tone he used that made men stand to attention? It was only a few months ago that this was intuitive. That men lived or died by a nod of his head. Why had he let himself believe that Silver had stripped this from him forever?

 _Your name is Captain James Flint_ , he thinks, and turns.

“Thank you for the meal,” he says, and thank God, he can feel it coming back to him now. “Although I would prefer if I could take a turn on deck before eating. In the fresh air.”

Cooper shifts uneasily on his feet, not meeting James’ eyes. “Not allowed to let you out,” he tells the ceiling, like he wants to obey against his better judgement. 

“Ask the first mate, then,” James says. This is a gamble, but a good one—if he was the one putting together a crew to deliver an infamous pirate in chains, a crew that would unite the pirates of old Nassau and the sailors of new Nassau, he’d pick a respected pirate sailor to serve as first mate under Medlan. The kind of man who might grant Captain Flint the small mercy of standing on deck on his own two feet.

Cooper nods once, decisively, seemingly glad to defer this decision up his chain of command. “I’ll ask ‘im.”

Ten minutes later, James is following on Cooper’s heels out the door, casting an apologetic glance back at Thomas. Better, they’d agreed, for Flint to be seen alone.

“Pretty far from the way we first met,” he says conversationally, as they duck out from belowdecks and squint in the sun. “Gunner on the _Sunsea_ , weren’t you? When I was a new hand?”

“Not just pirates what need gunners,” Cooper replies shortly.

“No, I suppose not.” 

The deck is full of the subdued bustle of a relatively calm day of sailing. A few men are low in the rigging, doing what looks to James to be replacing a frayed stretch of rope in a ladder, while others stand on deck, adjusting the sails under the ship’s master’s watchful eye. 

James catches sight of Medlan about halfway down the deck. Medlan is just as he remembers: a tall, thickset man, with a pressed and tailored Navy uniform and an expression like a block of granite. A man of great _inertia_ , as slow to anger as he is unstoppable when in motion. 

Medlan’s gaze fixes on James and turns a shade more stony. But the man beside him, whose uniform marks him as the first mate, nods companionably at James. A former pirate indeed, then.

Cooper lets James walk the deck, chatting to the men and helping out where he can, for nearly an hour before an apologetic nod from the first mate tells them it’s time for James to be locked away again. Some of the men, mostly former pirates, readily talk with James while they work, offering information about the crew’s morale and the goings-on in Nassau to his willing ear. Others are more nervous, but he singles out a few of these to try to win over. By the time he has to return to the cabin, he’s feeling satisfied with the day’s work.

The next few days continue in this pattern. Every day, after the noon meal, James is allowed to wander the deck, though always with Cooper close behind. He talks with the men, helps with some minor chores, teaches a starstruck ship’s boy how to measure their speed. 

And always, always, he tells stories.

“This ship is a beauty, but I’ll always be fondest of my first command,” he tells a man he has pegged as a legitimate sailor as James helps him adjust a knot by the foremast. “The _Walrus_. God, she could take anything. Once she got a full broadside from a Dutch merchant ship from barely ten yards away, and kept going with hardly any damage. We took that ship an hour later and every man aboard it could hardly understand how we were still afloat.”

“You remind me of a man I met on my first ship in Nassau,” he remarks to the nervous-looking ship’s carpenter later that day, as he passes the man a nail. “Jacobs, his name was. A calm enough man, but always looking for justice for his crew. One day the captain had a friend of his flogged over a minor error, and Jacobs stood and called for a vote for captain at that very moment. Took the captaincy and had the old captain flogged instead, for ill using his crew.”

“This captain of yours seems . . . unyielding,” he says mildly the next day to the helmsman, as Medlan looks down from the upper deck. “Any pirate captain behaved like that, he’d find himself dumped in Nassau with neither ship nor crew next time he made land. If he was lucky.”

“Too fuckin’ right,” grunts the helmsman under his breath, then glances back worriedly to make sure that Medlan didn’t hear before continuing in lower tones. “S’not like he has any reason to care if he works us to death, does he.”

James enjoys the captain’s wary eye on him from just out of earshot. _Let him wonder_ , he thinks.

—

A tentative knock at the door rouses James from his early-morning sleep.

He startles up and out of bed, his long years in command making it a reflex to stand on his own two feet at the first disturbance. Thomas rolls over and catches his eye blearily, his face pale and shadowy in the grey predawn light washing in from the window, and James knows they’re both thinking the same thing: a _knock_? At the door of a prison cell?

“Come in,” he calls.

The lock rattles softly, as if whoever’s outside doesn’t wish to be discovered. Cooper opens the door and steps into the room, flanked by two men. James recognizes them—Rowley, the first mate, and the helmsman, Stevens. Stevens closes the door behind them, and if James hadn’t known what was happening by now, that closed door would have clinched it.

“We know what you’re up to,” Cooper tells him softly. No preamble, just a firm voice and a steady gaze. “Goin’ on all the time about piratin’ to the men. Tellin’ them how much more money is in it. Tellin’ them the captain’s no good.”

“And?” 

“And we want your help with it,” Rowley says. 

“With what?”

Cooper gives him a hard look that says clearly _Don’t pretend you’re stupid_. “You’re him, ain’t you. You’re Flint. You want a captain gone, he may as well be on the bottom of the sea already.”

“And you want Medlan gone?” James asks, his tone even. He glances down to where Thomas is sitting on the bed, unheeded by the sailors. He wonders how Thomas will react to this. Even though Thomas had wanted this mutiny that might set them free, had helped him plan what he would say to stir up the men, the reality of a mutiny was far different than plotting it. Without the support of a large majority of the men, it could be brutal, a bloody civil war in miniature. 

Thomas gives him a tiny, tense smile. James feels a rush of worry for him—what is this man going to do in a pitched battle? Of course this isn’t the same Thomas he knew in London, but hard labor is no substitute for years with a gun in your hand.

“We want Medlan gone,” Cooper affirms.

James breathes in. He can’t scare them off, but he needs to know they’re serious. “Think about this, Cooper. This isn’t like a ship on the account. You make a move against Medlan—any man makes a move against Medlan—and it’s a crime against the Crown. You can never go back to a legitimate ship. You could hang.”

“We know,” says Rowley. “Let’s—let’s stop with all this shit, all right? We’re getting rid of Medlan because it ain’t been easy since England came to Nassau. For any of us. We liked having a say in who led us and how. We liked getting paid what we got from prizes. Fuck, we just liked fighting, some of us.” Cooper gives a half laugh at this, sudden in the quiet. “And now they’ve got us, what, worked to death on their say-so, hauling around as prisoner a man who used to be the best of us? Fuck that.”

“But why come to me?”

“We’ve been making a count of the men who would stick with us if we tried it. We got sixteen men so far, but we figure with you, well. Your reputation precedes you. With you leading it, we could get enough of ‘em that it wouldn't even need to be a fight,” Rowley says. 

“All right,” James acquiesces. He clears his throat. Glances back down at Thomas to steady himself. “All right. If you’re sure you’re serious, here’s what we start with.”

The first rays of sun are starting to pierce through the window by the time the men have the beginnings of a plan together. James is still a bit worried—the ragtag crew of former pirates and green sailors they’ve recruited does not inspire confidence—but he’s impressed with the men’s planning, and grateful when Thomas chimes in with a levelheaded comment in exactly the right place. When the mutineers leave, the click of the lock turning is somehow a relief this time: a promise that their world is still separate from James and Thomas’ world. For now.

“Are they ready?” Thomas asks, as James heaves himself down to sit on the back on the cot. Thomas’s voice is tense, but there’s no trace of fear in it, nor do his hands tremble as he picks up one of James’ and brings his palm to his lips.

“They will be,” James tells him. “Are _you_ ready? I don’t expect you’ll need to fight, but I can’t promise it will stay entirely away from you. Especially with a plan like this . . . it’s risky.” God. James’ nerves are going to be strung out like piano wire until this is over. To get Thomas back and be confined with him to a work camp would be almost intolerable, but to lose Thomas in the attempt to escape—he can’t even consider it.

“I’m ready.”

James grips his hand tighter, looks him in the eye. “What’s next for us, love?” he asks. “Where can we go, after this?”

—

Alone with Thomas, propped up against his broad chest while Thomas strokes his short hair and tells him the happier stories of people he’d met during their time apart, James can almost believe they’re already free. Can almost believe this is the cottage on the north end of New Providence Island or on Madi’s home island that they’ve talked about, daydreamed about. If he tunes out the slap of waves against the ship and focuses on the gentle rise and fall of Thomas’s voice, he’s already there, in his quiet future.

Until a single shot from one of the _Ladysmith_ ’s great guns splits the air.

James sits bolt upright, feeling Thomas start behind him, feeling adrenaline jolt through him.

“This wasn’t part of the plan.” Thomas’s voice is tense, worried. “Was it?”

“It certainly was not.” James swings his legs off the cot and starts shoving his boots on. _I should be up there_ , he thinks, cursing the bolted door that separates him from the crew. “Who the fuck are we shooting at?”

Footsteps clatter down the hall outside at speed, and the lock rattles frantically. “Flint! We’ve got a problem!” Cooper calls as he flings the door open. “Get up here, there’s no time!” 

James follows him out the door, one boot still unlaced, mind turning over furiously. Was it an enemy nation’s ship that just happened to interrupt the mutiny plan? If so, why would Cooper have gotten him? 

Thomas follows behind him, still barefoot. James spares a thought about asking him to stay in the cabin, but he knows it would be wasting his breath. Instead, he just listens as Cooper explains.

“Apparently there’s been _another_ plot to mutiny,” says Cooper breathlessly as he begins to climb the stairs to the upper deck. “But these stupid bastards didn’t tell us what they were planning. It’s the Navy men. They wanted to be proper pirates. Thought they’d shoot at the next merchant ship they saw, to force us to stand and fight them, and take command from Medlan in the process.”

“Not a bad idea, if they’d done it with _any_ planning or sense,” James mutters. 

“Why can’t we signal the other ship, say it was a mistake, stop the fight?” Thomas asks. “Seems like we shouldn’t fight Medlan’s men and another ship at once, if we can help it.”

“No good,” Cooper grunts as the three of them crash out onto the deck. James blinks in the sudden sunlight. The crew stands clustered into the uncertain, guarded groups of men waiting for the battle lines to be drawn so they know whose side to join. Some of them have their hands on their sword hilts. “It’s a Spanish ship.”

“ _Fuck,_ ” says James fervently. “They won’t back down, then, they’d just think it was a trick if we tried to signal them.” This is _not_ how it was supposed to go. It was supposed to be a nearly bloodless victory with enough of the men on their side, a quick coup that could see them free and Medlan in chains. And keep Thomas, who looks so vulnerable with his bare feet on the deck of a ship that’s about to be plunged into a battle, far away from any bloodshed.

Scanning the _Ladysmith_ ’s surroundings, he sees the Spanish ship, a mid-sized merchant vessel just out of range of their port side battery. As he watches, the ship begins to open its gunports. James’s heart pounds—he only has a few minutes to finish what the Navy mutineers have started before the Spanish ship has them in range. 

Without warning, Medlan throws himself out from belowdecks behind them. For a man normally so immovable, he looks truly insane. His features are twisted with a mixture of tension and anger; his hair is loose from its tie and flying behind him; every inch of his powerful frame is tensed as if to spring. “Who the _fuck_ fired that shot?” he roars. “Are you trying to get us all killed?” 

Medlan yanks a pistol from his gunbelt and stalks towards the great guns, trembling with rage. 

Out of the corner of his eye, James notices a man cowering next to one of the great guns. The Navy man who’d fired the shot, no doubt, but James’s mind supplies him with an image of another man who’d fired such a shot—cocky grin belying the fear in his eyes as he faced down Dufresne, long curly hair . . . 

James blinks. He can’t afford to be distracted, not with the Spanish ship beginning to round on them in the distance, not with Medlan stalking the deck with a murderous expression. 

James grabs for Cooper’s belt knife and is rewarded with the heft of the weapon in his hands. He starts for Medlan, to try to get him to back down, to cut this thing off at the head before they have to deal with the Spanish ship—but Medlan has already seen the gunner. 

And Thomas, whose protective instincts have been honed in God-knows-what hellhole for ten long years, steps in front of the gunner as Medlan raises his pistol. 

James lunges before the captain can get a shot off. Pure instinct. Pure fear for Thomas, whose eyes are wide, whose hands are out as if to plead the captain’s mercy. James grabs Medlan’s hair and wrenches his head back, as his other arm comes up to press the edge of Cooper’s knife to Medlan’s throat. 

James leans into his ear and hisses, “Drop. The _fucking_. Gun.” 

Medlan’s pistol falls to the floor with a clatter. And James slashes deep into his throat anyway. 

Medlan’s body slumps to the floor. Without his bulk between them, James can once again see Thomas. Meet Thomas’s eyes. Then those pretty blue eyes, wide with shock, fix on James’s hands. 

James drops his own gaze to them. Blood coats his entire right hand like a slick, shiny glove. Fuck. Jesus shitting fuck. 

Shouts and the sound of scuffling break out behind him, and James gathers himself—there’s no time to worry what Thomas sees when he looks at him now. Whether Thomas still sees his lover, or a bloodthirsty pirate, or a monster. 

“All hands to your stations!” James bellows, praying to any god that might have mercy on him that enough of the crew obeys that they survive the fight to come. 

There’s a terrible pause. And then Rowley nods at him, as if to cede to the feared pirate Captain Flint, and repeats the order. “All hands to your stations!” 

James sizes up the crew, his mind whirling with calculations—how many men he’ll need to deal with the Spanish, how many men are going to be a problem for him. At Rowley’s order, some leap to obey, roaring their delight at embarking on a grand career of piracy or at being back beneath the black. More avoid James’ eye but set to work regardless. No doubt they’re glad that things have been decided for them, without their having to take sides for or against Medlan. A few men—older Navy hands, James realizes, officers who have more to lose than the desperate men caught by the press gangs who serve under them—start for James, swords drawn. James casts about for a weapon better than his six-inch knife, but it proves unnecessary to defend himself: at a whistle from Cooper, five of the mutineers are on these few respectable men, wrestling their weapons out of their hands. 

Good. Good. That seems to be the last of the men who would directly challenge him, but facing an armed Spanish merchant ship with a motley band of scared Navy men and former pirates—that’s going to pose its own difficulties. James scans the men for familiar faces, familiar steely expressions in the face of a prize to be taken. “Mr. Anders!” he calls. The man in question, a veteran pirate with a tattoo of a snake curling from his jaw to his neck, looks up from packing his pistol with shot. “You’re leading the vanguard. Take them”—James points—“and him, and him, and Lorton and Mulligan, and anyone else you think will be useful.” Anders dips a nod and begins to marshall his men. 

_What else to be done?_ James thinks, desperately trying to keep his eyes on Rowley, who’s awaiting orders. James can’t let his eyes drift to Thomas. He can’t face Thomas right now. “Ready the gun crews,” he tells Rowley tersely. “We have more speed, she’ll be in range for a broadside in a few minutes.” 

By the time they draw level with the Spanish ship, the _Ladysmith_ has absorbed a few rounds of cannonfire with as little damage as can be hoped for, James’s makeshift vanguard is on the rails, and James can’t avoid Thomas any longer. He steals a few precious seconds to find Thomas crouched next to a store of gunpowder, fetching some for the powder boys on the main deck. 

“Thomas,” James says softly. 

Thomas turns to meet his eyes. James sees fear in his taut posture, and hope for their escape in his eyes. In the twist of his mouth is something James doesn’t want to interpret, lest it cut him to the bone. 

God. He has just killed a man in front of Thomas. He will kill again before this battle is through. This is not what he wants Thomas to see of him. 

“I’d ask you to go belowdecks to take cover if I thought you’d do it,” James murmurs. A staccato burst of gunfire sounds above them, and Rowley and Anders scream out orders. James ducks closer to Thomas to be heard, feels the heat of him through the few inches that separate them, feels him tremble. “I . . . I need you to be safe. I love you.” 

Before Thomas can reply, a shout rings out above the noise of battle. “Flint! We need you!” 

He jumps up. Anders’ men have started to leap over the rails, but Anders himself is down, blood seeping from a wound in his thigh to stain the deck of the Spanish ship. Without him to lead, the Spanish are cutting through their ranks. 

James needs to go over the rail himself. 

He casts one more look at Thomas and whispers, “Be safe.” Then he plunges back into the fight. 

By the time James’s boots hit the deck of the Spanish ship, the battle has turned once more. A few men lunge at him, but their swings are wild, and he cuts them down easily. It's automatic now, he's both relieved and frightened to find. It's automatic how he slips back into being someone who can bet the lives of his men against the lives of others, with no more fear than the fear of a man in a high-stakes card game. 

He doesn't like being this person, when he comes down from the way a battle makes him feel. But right now it's how he needs to be, as he directs his men to set up around the mainmast, protecting each other’s backs. A few go after a knot of Spanish men, trying to get to their captain to force his surrender. 

James looks up to the helm just as a stray shot takes down the Spanish helmsman. With the helmsman down, the rudder swings loose, the ship lurching starboard on the whims of the current. A horrible grinding noise rends the air as the starboard side of the Spanish ship’s bow scrapes against the _Ladysmith_ ’s. 

A shout rings out from the bow of the _Ladysmith_ , and James feels it like a lightning strike—that was _Thomas_. 

He looks wildly about. As James’s eye catches on Thomas’s lanky form near the rail of the _Ladysmith_ , he hopes desperately that he can get back aboard his ship in time, fuck, why did he _ever_ let Thomas into a battle— 

But as he focuses, he realizes Thomas is handling himself surprisingly well. He’s somehow gotten hold of an oar from one of the launches, and he’s laying about with it as a few of the Spanish men try to leap to the _Ladysmith_ ’s deck, to get behind James’s lines. As James watches, heart still racing, Thomas catches one of the men around the head with the oar as the man prepares to leap aboard, knocking the man into the water below. Thomas must feel James’s shocked eyes on him, because he looks down to the Spanish deck. They lock eyes. 

For half a heartbeat, James panics. What will he see in Thomas’s expression? Fear? Blame? Hatred? 

Then, somehow, this wonderful man favors James with a grim smile. Even as men shoot and scream and fall around him, James feels that smile like a benediction. 

An instant later, a cheer goes up behind him. “ _They surrender!_ ” 

— 

James stops to bestow only the most necessary of orders upon his brand-new crew before he leaves them to removing anything of value from their prize and catches Thomas’s eye meaningfully. A minute later, he’s crashing through the door to the captain’s cabin of the _Ladysmith_ with Thomas on his heels. He’s intensely aware of the hard smile on his face, of the fact that this is old and thrillingly new at once: Thomas at his side while he retakes command, Thomas and _Flint_ in the same small cabin. 

Thomas slams the door behind them, and the _bang_ brings James crashing back to reality with a brutality that knocks the wind from him. This is _Thomas_. It’s not S—it’s not anyone who has seen him fight and kill before, anyone who has known James Flint the pirate. God. It’s coming, then, isn’t it. Thomas is going to say that he was mistaken, that he cannot be with a man who killed for a living for ten years, that he cannot even stand to look at him. James looks down to his hand, still smeared with traces of Medlan’s blood, and then forces himself to look up to meet Thomas’s eyes. 

Thomas’s eyes, which are much farther from disappointment and much closer to his own than James expected. Thomas’s eyes, which are alight with victory and with a fire that James identifies a second too late as _want_. 

Thomas grabs him by the collar and swings him around to crowd him up against the door, dragging him into a messy kiss. The press of his body is a searing heat against James, and his hands are eager, reaching for James’ face, his back, his neck. 

“James, love—” says Thomas breathlessly as he pulls away, “oh, you were beautiful there, you’re so beautiful, I can’t believe—I’ve never seen you like that before.” 

“Thomas—” James starts weakly. He paws at Thomas’s chest to give them some separation, to give Thomas room to realize that it’s just that his blood is up with battle, that Thomas cannot want him anymore. But Thomas surges forward to pull him into another desperate kiss, and God help him, James cannot deny either of them this. He lets his arms wrap around Thomas to clutch at the back of his shirt. Thomas bites at his lower lip, and a groan escapes him. 

Thomas pulls back to smile wickedly at him, breathing hard. “Thomas—wait,” James manages to pant into the scant space between them. “Wait. I just endangered you, I just _killed_ a man in front of you. You cannot tell me you still see me the same way.” 

“See you what way?” Thomas looks genuinely confused. 

James waves a hand helplessly. _As someone to be kissed like this. Someone for you to love._ He can’t get the words out, but Thomas seems to understand. 

“Love, you killed a man to _save_ me,” Thomas corrects him. His eyes are earnest, and God, James could drown in the way his thumb strokes James’s cheek, the way his fingers slide gently into James’s short hair. “You led men in battle because it needed doing, or the Spanish would have shown us no mercy. James, darling. You cannot seriously believe I don’t love you after you saved me.” 

“And you saved me,” James breathes. They still need to talk about this, but the way Thomas’s arms press into the door on either side of James to keep him in place, the way he smiles when he leans down for another quick kiss, the way his body presses James against the door—well. These are all excellent arguments for letting that conversation wait for another day. “If those men had gotten over the bow while our backs were turned, my line would have been lost.” 

Forget Odysseus laying down his oar. He’d take Thomas being his avenging angel with an oar any day. 

“Anything for my captain,” Thomas replies, his eyes glittering, his smile sharp. 

James pulls him in to kiss him breathless again. 

— 

Afterwards, James reluctantly adds up the minutes and realizes that the crew will need to hear from him soon, as Thomas examines the books stowed neatly on a shelf by the bed. So much to do with his new crew—put the loyalists aboard the Spanish ship, get the ship’s master to help him set a course to Nassau, and—well, that’s it, really. That’s it because he doesn’t want to consider his future beyond that, for now. 

The crew, though. The crew will do well in Nassau. Piracy can’t be completely gone there, after all, and they handled themselves well today. Once he and the crew part ways, he and Thomas will settle in somewhere on Madi’s island, where no one who knows him will breathe a word of his whereabouts to the British. And then he’ll . . . start a small farm? Write a book? Print seditious pamphlets? He’ll do _something_. He’s looking forward to seeing Madi, at the very least. At least she’ll be in the same boat as him, now that war is out of the question. They can figure out how to beat their swords into plowshares together, or something. 

What the fuck even is a plowshare? Maybe “farmer” is out of the question as a potential future occupation. 

“Oh,” says Thomas. It’s the soft, gently thunderstruck tone of his voice that tugs James out of his reverie; it sounds like Thomas first discovering him in London half a lifetime ago. 

“What is it, love?” James asks, turning back to where Thomas stands at the bookshelf. 

“ _Meditations_.” Thomas slides the book from the shelf, his large hands cradling it like it’s a precious gift. 

“ _Oh_ ,” says James in wonderment. “I kept that, you know. All those years, Miranda and I just had that book, and that old portrait of you that doesn’t even look like you. To remember you by.” He takes the book, opens it to where Thomas’ loved inscription would have been in his own copy—and freezes. 

In place of Thomas’ generous, looping handwriting, there is a thin, hastily-written inscription, written in a hand that James feels like a jolt to the heart even before he reads the words. 

_Captain—25.0644,-77.3027. Sorry for writing in your book. J.S._


	2. XL

Panting under the weight of a chest of medicines, Madi gives up on trying to heave it into place on a shelf and lets it thunk gently to the ground instead. She sits down on it for a moment’s rest, letting the cool darkness of her mother’s storeroom envelop her with a sense of calm. The bustle of the maroon town outside barely filters through the thick wooden walls, built to keep the rain off of the precious materials sent from off the island, and Madi feels wrapped up and sealed away from the outside world for just a moment of pause.

It is, she reflects as she traces her fingers idly over the scarred wood of the chest, perhaps the first true moment of pause she’s had in weeks. The months since the war was ripped from her have been a blur, a different place to rest her head almost every night. The floor of Eme’s room in Nassau, where the noise of the tavern across the street had kept her up for hours. Benches in cookhouses and meeting spaces up and down New Providence Island, when her father’s old spies had welcomed her in wonderment, and out in the grass by the road when they had turned her away in fear of getting caught with a leader from the old enemy. An inn in Port Royal, after her father’s contact there proved willing to meet but less willing to give her shelter.

If she runs far enough, fast enough, the past can’t keep up with her, and her future inheritance can be staved off for awhile. The past, with its promises of a war, with Flint’s easy camaraderie and his warm hand on her shoulder, with Silver at her side and in her bed. The future, with the burden of leadership that her mother has bent beneath for Madi’s whole life. Both are too painful to consider, so Madi keeps running for now.

Because that’s what this has been about. The running. Much as she pretends to herself that it’s about reestablishing contact with her father’s network, to see what can be the next steps in her fight, she has barely been able to think about the next steps so far. Unthinkable to consider a future without the war she poured herself into for so many months. Unthinkable to return to lead her people now that the promises she made to them, the promises of a true revolution, ring hollow.

Her mother has been patient with her so far, believing that her travel is a good way to expand her mind before she settles home to lead, but Madi knows that she won’t stand for it much longer. They’ll have to have that conversation sometime during this supply run home, but for now, she will sit in the storeroom as long as she can, letting the world continue without her.

And what to do next? Madi is out of her father’s contacts now, so there is no need to keep traveling. She could join Julius on his plantation raids, but that would mean too much time spent in Nassau for comfort. Nassau, where _he_ seems around every corner.

She saw his back in the market two days ago. Just for an instant, but it cut her to the bone, the sight of his long dark hair and jerking stride achingly familiar and yet walled off from her forever as though by impenetrable glass. 

No, she cannot return to Nassau yet. 

Suddenly, a loud, distant whistle pierces the air, coming from the direction of the bay. One of the lookouts has spotted a boat, then, and if Julius’s past results are anything to go by, Madi already knows who’s on it. 

She ducks out of the low entrance to the storehouse and hurries along the path towards the bay, calling out to a pair of children who stare as she goes past, “Get the doctor! And tell them to bring food and blankets as well. Tell them to come down to the bay.” 

The children just stare, so she switches languages and starts again — more languages than Madi can count are spoken on the island, and she’s prepared to switch a few more times before they understand — but when the older one tugs the younger’s arm, she knows they understood the first time. Just surprised to be addressed by the princess, or even to _see_ the princess, so often is she absent these days.

_Princess_. She’d never liked that word. It carried with it the dust and stale air of English throne rooms, where lives and deaths of people across the Earth were decided by those who had never met them and cared nothing for them. In her mother’s tongue her title would be _khosatsana_. A friendlier word, for it carried with it the meaning that her mother had placed upon it; it meant someone who cared for her people. In other languages spoken on the island her title would be _ɔhenebabea_ , or _nasoma_ , or _ọmọ-alade_ , each better than _princess_ , but each still with the same problem. 

The title, in whichever language, is something that would anchor her there. Would pin her to the island like a butterfly on a card. In an earlier life, when she had not left her island since the day she set foot on it, she had known it as her duty to rule eventually. But from the minute she had left the island to start a war, it had seemed ever more intolerable to be stuck here, pinned through the heart by the title of _princess_ , while others’ freedom was still to be won. 

Her mother is around the next bend in the road, unmistakable with her yellow headscarf and her head held high, and Madi falls into step beside her as the bay comes into view through the trees.

“There must have been another raid last night,” her mother tells her, barely turning to make sure it’s her. “Julius told me they were planning to hit the Laurence plantation, but I had no idea it would be so soon.”

As they draw up to the hills overlooking the bay, Madi counts eight longboats nearing the shore. “That has to be at least fifty,” she says. That looks about right to her — if these are escapees from the Laurence plantation, that should mean that nearly all of them survived the raid and were able to get out. “Where are we going to house them all?”

“After the last raid, nobody has any room to spare. We’ll put blankets for them in the meeting room until the new houses are ready.” 

Madi’s mother stops before they begin to climb down the hill. Her gaze is turned out toward the water, but it’s a faraway look. Madi plants her feet beside her and looks out as well, trying to see whatever her mother is seeing. 

“They will need you soon.”

“Mother, I—”

“They will. That is not my opinion, it is a fact. More of these people are arriving every week, Madi, and it bodes something coming, although I do not know what. I led them through one war, but only in name. It was you who gained the experience of fighting it alongside them. And I am so tired, Madi.” Madi turns to look at her, and it’s as though a disguise is falling away before her eyes. Her mother’s face, so carefully schooled into dignity and neutrality around anyone else, looks worn. “I cannot lead them through whatever is coming.”

“I will do it.” Those words pin her to the earth as surely as any title.

“Yes, I know you will. You may continue to travel and work for the time being. But this cannot last forever.” She takes Madi’s hand and presses it tightly. Then they continue down to the bay.

As they near the water’s edge, Julius splashes out of the lead longboat to meet them. His shoulders are slumped with exhaustion and there’s a bandage high on one arm, but Madi reads triumph in the lift to his chin. “Two men in the boat behind need the doctor the most.” Despite his overnight ordeal, his voice has the assured cadence of an old soldier, used to delivering such reports. “One shot in the leg. The other one in the shoulder. I am not so sure he’ll make it. The rest are all right, some minor wounds and some just need food and rest, but…” He ducks his head. Swallows. “We lost Naomi.”

_Naomi_? Sudden tears prick at Madi’s eyes. Naomi had been a tough, wiry woman who’d come to them after the fight for Nassau and had insisted on accompanying Julius on raids. Just one more name of those lost to the fight, now. Madi adds her to the litany of the lost that she keeps in her heart. 

The next longboat pulls ashore just as the doctor and a few other men and women from the town arrive, hurrying to help pull people from longboats and usher them into the village. Madi shakes her head to clear it for the time being. These people need her before she can indulge in sadness. She helps a bearded young man who’s favoring his right leg out of the first boat, and she and Julius drape his arms over their shoulders to help him get to shelter.

“Did the raid go well?” she asks Julius, over the hubbub of voices offering or crying out for aid. The injured man’s arm is an uncomfortably warm, sweaty weight against her shoulders. She helps him heave himself up a step along the path, murmuring soothing nonsense as he cries out. 

“Almost as well as we could hope.” Julius grunts as the injured man leans heavily on him. “Easy, Abeiku. We’ll get you to a place to rest.”

Once they deposit Abeiku in the meeting house and turn back toward the beach, she gets the rest of the report from Julius. “As raids go, it was not too difficult. We got word that the militia had been held up by the pirate resistance, so we had plenty of time to get everyone out.”

“The _pirate_ resistance?” Had she misheard? But Julius nods. “Is there truly anything left of them? What are they resisting, now that they have a governor who turns a blind eye to them?” Madi had heard whispers of _something_ going on during her time on the island, but this? What can be in this for them? “Pirates are not known for helping us out of the goodness of their hearts.” 

“I have not spoken to the pirates directly,” Julius says, “but it does not seem to be many of them. Just a core group of those who John Silver can sway” — Madi does not react to that name. She does not — “to believe that without the plantation owners, the last men besides the governor with any influence in London, they would be more truly independent. Free to go about pirating or becoming respectable as they see fit.”

It makes sense. Without the plantation owners, there would be nobody to bring colonial oversight down upon Nassau. No one but Featherstone and the merchants in his pocket, who never would. 

But— 

“And you trust them? After everything?”

“I do not have to,” says Julius. “They do not ask for my trust. Nor even that we work together. They have simply been obstructing the militia for us on our last few raids. But because they have helped us without asking anything of us, I will extend a hand to them soon. To see if we might plan more effectively together.”

“A nation of us and the pirates,” she says slowly, thunderstruck. “This is what you are working towards, with your raids.”

Julius shrugs. “I know that I did not support your war.” There is no apology in his voice, just fact. “I did not support the endless bloodshed that I thought that you and Flint would lead us to. But this seems to me a good compromise. We can free those remaining on the island, our friends and our kin. And then we can rest.”

He stops walking and grips her arm suddenly, a comradely gesture that takes Madi by surprise. “Join me on my next raid. People listen to you. We could use you.”

It’s a good next step for her. Perhaps an obvious one. And one that could only be offered by a man such as Julius, who sees her as a leader, but not as a precious thing to be protected. But ally herself with pirates again? Rest her hopes on them, after the only two whom she trusted are lost, or lost to her, forever? _And most of all_ , says the small, treacherous part of her that thinks of herself before those in her care, _if you did join the raids, you would have to work with_ him _again_. 

Madi does not answer. 

—

On the steps outside an upper room at the edge of Nassau Town, Madi steels herself and knocks.

The door swings open. Madi catches a glimpse of a darkened room lit by slants of light through the shutters, a shelf that holds some tin and clay dishware, a dining table cluttered with paper. A chair in the corner, with a young woman reclining delicately in it, reading a book and feigning disinterest. The room is small but well-appointed, and details like the yellow curtains and some flowers in a glass on the table show that it is well cared for.

The occupant of the doorway, however, requires Madi’s more immediate attention.

“The fuck you want?” Anne Bonny asks mildly, the ease in her tone belying her words. With her loose trousers, bare feet, and an untucked shirt, she leans casually in the doorway, looking at home.

“I’ve come with an offer,” says Madi. “And a request.”

“Yeah?”

Madi takes a breath. “I heard you and Rackham are on the account again. I’d like to join your crew.”

“What —” starts Anne incredulously. The woman in the room behind her shifts, interested.

Madi cuts her off. “I have seven men who would join with me. They would need some training in sailing, but they are strong men, and good fighters. Loyal to the bone.” Anne’s eyes are narrowed, like she can’t quite believe who’s standing in front of her asking for this, but Madi has yet to turn over her winning card. “And they would back you as quartermaster, if a vote were called. My men are not like Nassau men. They are used to women who lead.”

Anne tilts her head, considering. 

“All right,” she says finally. “I’ll talk to Jack about it. Now what was the offer?”

“ _That_ was the offer,” Madi tells her, “an offer of good strong help in these uncertain times. And of an ally to you.”

Anne glances back into the room. The woman within meets her eyes with a sideways smile. “The request, then.”

“In exchange for our support of your crew” — Madi knows this is a delicate balance, how to frame it as though she is a leader in her own right offering her assistance, without offending Anne or revealing that she knows she is asking too much — “I would ask that you and Captain Rackham be . . . discerning in your choice of prizes to take. That you prioritize ships arriving or departing from the northern shore of New Providence Island.”

Anne fixes her with a stare. Madi wonders what’s going on behind those unblinking green eyes.  
“The planters’ ships, then.” A softly accented voice floats out of Anne’s room as the woman on the chair slips off it and comes to stand behind Anne. Up close, Madi recognizes her: Max, the woman who stood behind Woodes Rogers and Eleanor Guthrie. The woman who they say turned her back on Anne. The woman who, nevertheless, has won back Anne’s heart just as surely as she’s won back power in the Nassau that followed the governor she helped depose.

“What’s that?” Anne asks her.

Madi aches at the way Anne trusts Max to stand at her back, to lean into her like they are two trees planted together, swaying into each other in the breeze. Even after everything, after they fought on opposite sides of the war, each in their own way. Anne trusts her again.

“The planters’ ships,” Max repeats. “The ones supplying goods to the plantations, or carrying their crops away to market.”

“Yes,” Madi replies. What is this woman thinking? She has never met Max, but Max’s reputation precedes her. Her reputation for prioritizing Nassau’s security, no matter who that meant backing. Will this, in Max’s estimation, endanger or help the island that she holds dear?

Max turns, speaking to Anne lowly, holding Anne’s gaze as though Madi isn’t there. “You know I do not want to free Nassau through fighting,” she says lowly. Madi holds her breath. “But since you are going to stay on the account, this is not the worst fight you could choose. A new focus for your crew that will give the planters less sway over the island. It will bring Nassau closer to true independence, I think. And win some allies, though it will cost us some as well.”

Anne blinks slowly. “I’ll talk to Jack,” she allows. She turns to Madi, who lets out a slow breath, relieved. “Sounds like a good enough story that he might agree. As long as there’s enough money in it for the men.”

Madi’s heart lifts. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Be on the beach with your men at dawn tomorrow.”

—

Madi doesn’t much know Jack Rackham, but she does know that he’s a man not built to sit in silence.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” he says, breaking the stillness of his cabin, “but why exactly are you here?”

Madi hadn’t been sure why he’d invited her into the cabin just after they set out — to discuss how to integrate a former rebel leader into a crew of men who’d fought against her, maybe, or to arrange to have her men trained as sailors — but she hadn’t been expecting this. Hadn’t been expecting to be handed a cup of rum and water, with a gentility she hadn’t thought possible aboard a pirate ship, and to sit in companionable silence with Jack while Anne perches restlessly on the windowsill.

She opens her mouth to answer, but Jack cuts her off. “And _don’t_ say ‘because you invited me in here.’ John Silver used to pretend to be daft like that and it irritated the hell out of me, don’t tell me that’s another way he’s rubbed off on you.”

Madi feels that name like a punch in the gut, barely registering Anne’s response: “Only Jack’s allowed to pretend to be daft.” Anne aims a flicker of a grin at Jack from beneath her hat. 

“Yes, well. When I do it it’s brilliant strategy,” he says shortly. “For some reason, men can’t see past the cravat. The question stands, however, Miss Madi.”

She’s never known what to make of Jack Rackham. Opinions of him differed widely; “the gutless dandy what’s dragging Vane down,” she’d heard him called, or “that fucking rich bastard,” or yet again “the smartest son of a bitch I’ve ever sailed under.” She’d seen his value as an ally up close, and cursed him when he’d turned his back on the war, but here she stands anyway. In his cabin, drinking his rum. 

“Why I am here — on this crew, not in this cabin, as I assume you are asking,” Madi replies, her voice measured, “is because you and Anne are the only ones with the resources to push Nassau in the direction I would like it to go. When I asked Anne if I could join your crew yesterday, I did so out of a genuine belief that we could help each other.”

“There’s other crews.” Jack leans forward slightly in his seat, elbows and hands flat on his desk. He fixes Madi with a half smile that makes her feel like he’s testing her in a way she can’t yet divine. “Why join ours? I know I can’t be your favorite person at the moment. Not after Skeleton Island.”

“There are other crews,” Madi allows, “but I believe you to be the only captain left who cares enough about Nassau to listen to what I want for it. The only one left who will put aside a bigger prize today for the chance at stability and a measure of independence tomorrow. Were you not my favorite person after Skeleton Island, I would be able to put aside our past in the interest of Nassau’s future.” _You betrayed me_ , she thinks, _but another betrayal cut me deeper. From someone I trusted to his bones_. You _I can forgive, with time_.

“‘The only one left.’” Suddenly Jack looks tired. “I am sorry, you know. I think Flint was the best of us, once Charles was gone. I could believe in Flint’s visions of the future of Nassau — Jesus, I believed in it enough to risk my life over it. Anne’s life.”

Anne shifts in the windowsill, staring over Madi’s shoulder and into the distance. “Charles’s life,” she says roughly.

“Charles’s life,” Jack repeats. “God. I know what I left behind when I turned my back on Flint. I just believed that the other future that I purchased was worth it. Please believe me, Madi, that I thought this was the best way to avoid unbearable bloodshed.”

“I believe you,” Madi says softly. Why is it so much easier to hear explanations from this man, this man who means so much less to her? 

“ _I_ , however, don’t believe _you_.” Jack shakes his head a bit as if to clear it, and his mouth twists into an ironic smile.

“What?” Anne asks, startled. “Jack, she —”

But Jack steamrollers on. “I don’t believe that you joined our crew merely from some sense of _duty_ to Nassau. Some willingness to put aside our past. If that was the case, you could have joined with her husband here” — he jerks his head at Anne, who hisses “ _Stop_ calling her that!” — “and tried to get in behind the scenes of Nassau politics. You’re smart, you have connections to Max and Featherstone within the old resistance, I know you could have done that.”

“Then why do you think I joined you?” Madi’s voice is steady, though she hardly knows the answer herself. She has been defined in relation to other people, other things for so long — heir to her mother, leader to this war, right hand to Captain Flint — she cannot know how to make her own direction without these tethers. Cannot know why she makes decisions for herself, when she has made them for everyone else for so many years. She feels adrift.

“This is a _pirate_ ship, Miss Madi. We don’t do politics, we do violence. You joined us because out of your little trio, there’s more of Captain Flint in you than of Mister Silver. You joined because you want to take a piece out of England as badly as he ever did.”

“I don’t know what you — ”

Jack cuts her off. “And not with _politics_.” He points to the corner where her musket is propped, the heavy barrel shining dully in the afternoon light. “With _that_.”

—

Cannonfire obliterates the tense quiet of the ship, and Madi scrambles down the quarterdeck stairs to take cover, cursing herself for somehow thinking that she might be eased into pirate life.

_It was going to happen sooner or later_ , she tells herself, _they can’t all surrender or anyone would be a pirate_. But why did her first time on the account have to start so badly?

On the deck above her, Jack screams above the noise, “Two points starboard, and open the God damned gunports!” His ship’s master repeats the order as Madi desperately tries to cut through the fog of panic in her head and remember what she’s supposed to be doing. 

One of her men hands her a musket.

Right. Right. Not much use with a sword, she’d told Anne, but she’d had to learn to use a musket long before war had reached her island’s shores. Right.

The metal is cold in her hand and she fumbles it slightly. She feels men’s eyes bore into her, her mistake making her shake even more. Damn. 

_I cannot look weak_ , says a ghost’s voice in her head, distantly. 

Madi looks up to where Anne is readying the vanguard on the rails. Anne must feel her eyes in her back because she turns to meet Madi’s glance, just for a moment, and nods. Madi slides her hand along the barrel of the gun in her hands with new resolve, feeling the heft of it, checking that it’s loaded properly. She takes up her position with the rest of the marksmen behind the vanguard.

“ _Fire!_ ” Cannons ring out again, this time from their own ship. Madi watches as chain shot tears through the other ship’s sails, visibility slowing her and preventing her from simply escaping. Madi sends up one more desperate hope that they surrender, but no luck: as their own ship nears the merchant vessel, she hears “ _Prepare to repel boarders!_ ” ring out across the water.

From that moment on, all is storm and confusion. Three of her men refuse to leave her side, so she feels as safe as she can be in a pitched battle, though the terror that a stray shot will be her end claws its hooks into her chest. She chooses her shots carefully, though she has a poor vantage point once they draw close enough for Anne to lead the boarding party. Then Madi can only wait, each moment that she cannot find a clear shot feeling like an eternity that might swallow her or her new crewmates whole. 

The prize ship is smaller than their own, so its rail noses their upper hull, about five feet down from their deck. Easy, then, to watch as a man who had been lying bleeding on the ground struggles to his feet again, raising his sword and heading for Anne’s unprotected back. Easy to realize that Madi could never get a shot off without the danger of hitting Anne. Easy as climbing down a ladder to scramble down onto the deck of the prize ship, moving like a woman in a dream.

She doesn’t come back to herself until her boots hit the deck. The noise of battle rings out around her, and she hears her men calling her name from the deck of her own ship.

The man is still moving toward Anne. Madi can’t cry out to warn her; Anne is busy enough with her sword clashing against the wild swings of a man at her front. A warning will only distract her. Madi can only take the second she has left to save Anne to fumble her belt knife out of its sheath and drive it deep into the man’s back.

He cries out and falls. Anne turns, her eyes wide with shock as she realizes that Madi has just saved her life. Madi’s ears are ringing. Death is so impersonal, so far away, with a musket. Much different to feel a man’s breath shudder out of him as you pull your knife from his back.

When the gunshot pierces her calf, Madi is distantly thankful for the shock that makes her feel outside of her body. But she drops anyway.

—

Jack and Anne let her recover in the captain’s cabin. Out of respect for what, she doesn’t know. Her status as a princess? Her status as the only other woman (barring Mary, who likes to be among the men) on the crew? Madi doesn’t find out until the second day after her first prize, when she sits sideways in the hammock strung up across from Jack’s and Anne’s own.

Madi’s been dreading changing her bandage, which has gotten stuck to her wound, but it has to happen. She takes a breath to steady herself, then bends her leg to undo the knot on the old bandage. Pain lances through her leg as she starts to peel it away, and just as she can’t suppress a hiss of discomfort, Anne opens the door.

Anne takes in Madi’s awkwardly bent leg, her pained expression, and crosses the floor efficiently to her. “Let me,” Anne says, kneeling in front of her. The words are rough—rough is the only way Anne speaks, Madi supposes—but her hands are gentle as she takes the end of the bandage from Madi.

Madi sits back, letting her, wondering why Anne is helping her, letting her see this gentleness. Anne’s answer to her unspoken question comes in low tones a moment later. “You saved my life.”

“Yes …” Between the pain and the unexpected input from Anne, Madi’s thrown for a moment.  
“Nothing more I wanted to say, I guess. Just wanted to thank you. I might be dead if you hadn't joined our crew.” 

What do you say to that? _You’re welcome?_ Madi knows the ceremonies, the way that she or her mother would accept a formal thanks from a resident of her island. But this is new: a personal debt, a frown of concentration on the face of the hardened pirate before her. Madi’s grateful for the fact that Anne is busy with her bandage, now, as it gives her an excuse to wait before she responds. “You undoubtedly saved me by being as good in the vanguard as you are,” Madi decides on eventually. “I don’t believe you owe me anything.”

“‘Course I don’t. You’re on the crew now. We help each other.” 

Anne takes up a fresh bandage, then looks up at Madi. “You don’t owe us an answer, especially after that, but I do still wanna know. Why are you here? I know you were close with Flint, and you don’t seem like you forgive easy.”

“Sometimes what’s best for my island is that I forgive.” Madi can feel her voice slipping back into a formal, almost rehearsed answer, and she doesn’t like it.

Anne stops wrapping the bandage. “Is that true?”

“Yes. No.” Madi sighs. Decides to speak honestly. “No, I suppose it is not true. What is true is that there is still a pirate resistance in Nassau, helping some of those on my island to drive the plantation owners away.. I wanted to help, but I cannot face some pirates as easily as I can face you.”

“Mm.” Anne sounds surprised at her answer, but not exactly shocked by the news that there is a pirate resistance. Madi supposes that there is not much that goes on that Max doesn’t know about, and that there must of necessity be few secrets between Max and Anne these days. “So the war ain’t over for you.”

“I do not want it to be,” Madi confesses. “It is not a fight that I can give up, no matter what Jack Rackham and John Silver have tried to take away from me. I sacrificed so much, I promised my people so much. I cannot return to them and say that it was all for only their safety and the safety of pirates, while others suffer as they once did.” She does not ask Anne if the war is over for her. 

There’s another pause. Then the words “Can I ask you something?” fall from Madi’s lips before she can stop them.

“Maybe,” Anne allows.

“That woman, Max. You still love her?”

Anne stiffens, dropping the bandage and meeting Madi’s eye, her expression newly hostile. “Fuck’s it to you?”

“No I … I only meant that she betrayed you, in the war. And you trust her again, and you love her again. How can you do that?”

Anne relaxes by degrees, seeming to consider the question. “She apologized.”

“That is all?”

“That’s not all. It took me weeks before I would even look at her, I hated her so much. But she apologized. And she meant it. She did this for me, when my hands were hurt.” Anne gestures at the fresh bandage before tying it off, a soft expression on her face at the memory. “She gave up the chance at what she always wanted just for the possibility that I would even let her near me again. So yeah, I love her again.”

What would it take, Madi wonders, for her to speak of Silver like this? With obvious fondness in her voice, as though all of it, her cause and men’s lives, is water under the bridge?

—

Madi had planned to spend her nights on the ship, unwilling to waste her share of her first prize on rent when she could send it to her mother. But when Anne says offhandedly, “We don’t got an extra bed, but we got blankets you can put on the floor if you want to spend the night ashore,” Madi accepts the invitation, rather surprised at it. 

The sun is sinking by the time Max meets them at the door to the place she shares with Anne. She welcomes them with a fuss made over Madi’s newly-acquired limp and a quick kiss pressed to the corner of Anne’s mouth. Madi is grateful for the help in changing her bandages, but waves Max’s concern off as soon as the job is done. She’s full of an exhaustion that makes her feel as if gravity is pulling at her with an unnatural pressure, and she falls asleep almost as soon as she’s fully horizontal on the floor of Max and Anne’s front room. 

She spends a pleasant enough few days there. She feels a bit like an intruder into Max and Anne’s life at first, so she tries to spend most of the daylight hours outside. She reports to the ship to help with what odd jobs she can do with her wounded leg, wanders the dusty roads just beyond Nassau Town, or finds a quiet patch of sun to read the books she got in her first haul as a pirate. But Anne takes to bringing home enough supper for three, and Max takes to bringing home bits of gossip from the governor’s office that she thinks will interest Madi or make her laugh, and soon enough Madi feels at ease with them. After a few days, it feels only natural for her to begin rising early to make tea for the three of them to share before leaving for the docks or the governor’s office. After a few days more, it feels only natural for her and Anne to make tracks back to Anne’s home after a brief excursion aboard Jack’s ship proves fruitless.

The morning after that second trip, after Max leaves for work, it takes Madi a few tries to understand what Anne’s asking in her gruff, awkward way. When Madi finally understands, she can barely suppress laughter.

“Are you asking if I would like to help you pick out a tea service?” Madi has to call on all her years of learning to be as diplomatic as her mother to keep a straight face. She can’t imagine Anne would appreciate being laughed at, but the image of a hardened pirate perusing sugar bowls is a bit too much.

Anne colors slightly, shifting in her seat at the dining table, fidgeting awkwardly with the clay mug in front of her. “Only if you want. It’s just that Max likes nice things, and you always wear nice things, so I thought . . . it doesn’t matter.”

“It’s all right,” says Madi, still avoiding Anne’s eye to keep from smiling. “I remember Max saying that she would like to host the governor’s wife and the merchants for tea, in order to help them view her as a negotiator. I imagine you’d both prefer if you had nicer cups for such an occasion.” Anne nods gratefully; Max’s politics is more familiar territory for Anne than home goods.

Which is how Madi finds herself under the awning of a shop selling all manner of goods, trying to ignore the stares of well-dressed ladies as Anne rattles uncertainly around a selection of china saucers piled on a table outside the shop. 

Anne pokes at a small stack of them, brow furrowed as intensely as if she’s facing down an enemy captain whose methods are opaque to her. “These?” Anne jostles the table and the whole collection of porcelain clatters. A woman with white-blonde hair in an elegant updo tsks loudly at her.

Madi eyes the saucers. “Those are nice, but I did not see teacups that matched them. We should look inside the shop.” She turns to the shop door, but the shopkeeper has appeared in the doorway to glare at Anne. “Or perhaps not,” Madi amends.

Anne glances at the shopkeeper. He folds his arms. “Fuck this,” she announces, to a gasp from the blond woman. “We’re going to the other market.” She sets down a saucer with a _thunk_ and turns in the direction of the outlaw town, Madi matching her long strides to keep up.

The market in the outlaw town is an altogether different animal from the newly respectable market of Nassau proper. The town itself is an odd little shantytown that has sprung up by a bay outside of Nassau Town, just far enough that Featherstone can deny knowledge of what happens there. Almost nobody lives there, save a few people whose faces would be too recognizable from the war or their past misdeeds, but it’s bustling with people visiting to do business at almost every hour of the day or night. Pirates in common clothes mixed with purloined finery have set up blankets and stalls selling everything from Spanish wine to tame birds. Men and women Madi recognizes from her island hawk their fine craftwork, buy from the others, and nod their hellos at her. Less scrupulous farmers and merchants rub shoulders with everyone, some nervously approaching pirates to buy and sell, some jocularly calling out names of their favorite customers, looking at ease. Nobody bats an eye at Anne, with her pants and her sword and her foul language, except those who know to steer clear of her.

“Bonny my girl!” says a man heartily as Anne and Madi approach his stall. He’s a tall, slight man with dark brown skin, whose gold earring and intricate knife at his belt mark him as a pirate. He has an array of kitchenware of dubious provenance spread out on a blanket, with a tan cloth propped up on poles overhead to keep the baking sun off him and his wares. The men picking through bottles of whiskey from the colonies in the next stall glance up at the noise.

“‘Lo, Mulligan,” Anne returns. Affection is clear in her voice; it must be, Madi reasons, for any man to get away with calling Anne “my girl.”

“What can I get for you?”

Anne squints at him from beneath her hat. “You got a tea service?”

Mulligan lets out a loud, startled laugh at this. “Don’t know why everyone thinks that’s so funny,” says Anne sourly.

Mulligan recovers quickly. “No, no, not at all. I just got a lovely one in, taken from the captain’s cabin of a nice little Dutch schooner…”

Madi leaves them to it, picking through a few of Mulligan’s wares as they talk. Then the men in the whiskey stall catch her attention.

“It’s Silver what’s planning it,” mutters a thickset dark-haired one to his shorter compatriot. 

“Shoulda known,” replies the other. “Sounds like him, who else would get all those smart men behind such a daft plan. Oh, look at this one, says it’s from the Virginia colony.”

“Naw, you want Carolina whiskey if you want to impress a girl like yours, the Virginia stuff’s shit,” says the first man. “Look —”

Madi strains her ears, but she doesn’t catch anything else about Silver or a plan as they go back to bickering about their purchases. Although, as she and Anne pick their way back through the market to buy something to eat on the way home with Anne’s new tea service, Madi realizes she needn’t have bothered. As soon as she heard Silver’s name once, it’s like a dam breaking: she hears his name from all sides, its sibilance cutting through the air to her like musket balls, burying itself in her flesh just as easily.

What can he be doing that he is still spoken of by so many? Why does she need to know as badly as she needs to never see him again?

—

“What are you going to say to him?”

James smiles slightly at the tone before he registers the words. Thomas’s voice is carefully conversational yet heavy with meaning; he’s never been good at pretending that something doesn’t mean a lot to him. James is reminded of the time he’d first stepped into Thomas’s study. Thomas had compared the two of them to Adam and Eve, leaving James unable to breathe for a moment. Thomas’s voice had been measured then, too, but there was something about the way he’d pronounced each word so carefully that betrayed their importance to him. Like he could not bear to be misunderstood in that moment.

Now, out on deck beside Thomas, looking out over the sea together as the heat of the Bahamian sun is starting to make him sweat beneath his coat, James considers the question. They’re only a few days’ sail from Nassau now, so there’s not much time to figure it out. 

The men chatter around them and the waves slap the sides of the ship for another long moment before James responds. “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to talk to him at all.”

Thomas turns his head to give him a _look_. Even out of his peripheral vision, James knows that look. “What?” he says grumpily. “Maybe I don’t. In case you’ve forgotten, he tried to have me killed. And when that was over, he tried to have me committed. It’s a lot to forgive him for so quickly.” 

“I didn’t say I thought you should forgive him. But he left you that note, he must have helped engineer our escape. Does that not seem like a sort of apology?”

It says something about James’s world that secretly arranging for him to lead a bloody mutiny does indeed seem like an apology. It says something about the language Silver spoke with him. James can picture Silver arranging it the way he worked so much else behind the scenes: getting it into Featherstone’s head that the crew that delivered Captain Flint should be mixed pirates and Navy men, making sure that there were not one but two groups of dissatisfied sailors aboard who might be stirred to mutiny, delivering the copy of _Meditations_ with its message tucked away inside the cover. As messages go, it’s not _My truest love_ , but then, they had always spoken the language of action, not the language of love letters. What, James wonders, does Silver think that he meant by giving James the way to him?

“It does,” James allows. “But I’m going to walk away from the sea, remember? I’m going to cook for you, and we’ll get a little house like Miranda had, and…” He trails off. “And whatever Silver is up to now, it is incompatible with my retirement, I am sure of it.”

“You’re still thinking of retiring, then.”

“ _Yes_ ,” James insists. “That is all I had to dream about for _years_. Even when I never thought I would see you again, I hoped for a future where I would live inland with Miranda. Where I would never have to see the ocean again. Never have to hold a gun.”

“And you think you could be content like that? Living that life with me?” 

Something in Thomas’s voice makes James turn to look him in the eye. “Why?” James asks softly. “Could you not be content with a life like that?”

Thomas lets out a slow breath. Pauses. “I am not sure if either of us could. When I heard what you were trying to achieve with your war, do you know what I thought? I thought, ‘My God, he has found a worthier cause than any other man.’”

“I fought this war in your name.”

“It was entirely selfish for you, then? A quest for revenge, not for the ideals that you say Madi fought for? It is something you can lay aside now that you have me, and not just my name?”

“Thomas—” James fights to keep the emotion out of his voice. “I don’t understand why you are trying to push me back toward fighting.”

“James, love. I am not trying to push you anywhere you do not want to go. But if this fight isn’t over for you, if you cannot simply rest...I need you to know that I will still be by your side.”

James thinks of Madi, then. What is she doing? Can she lay this fight aside, even if the war is not to be had? Almost certainly not, no matter what he had been daydreaming about settling down to do with her. They are too much alike, for all their differences, for either of them to put this aside. “I don’t know if it’s over for me,” says James finally. “But if it is not, is that really something you can live with?”

“Must I repeat myself? James, I’ve changed too. Far more than when all I knew of England was its politics, I have seen what England is capable of. I will support you, I will even fight with you, if you will let me. Or—I don’t know how much use I’d be, but I’ll do _something_. Earn my place alongside Captain Flint.”

“You keep mentioning _Captain Flint_.” James sighs. “What are you trying to say?”

“He knew about the book.” The words fall from Thomas’s lips in a rush, like they’ve been running around his head for days, waiting to be let out. “He knew to leave you the note in _Meditations_ , so he must have known why you’d look there.”

“ _That’s_ what this is about?” James asks, baffled. “Yes, Silver knew about the book. I’m sorry if you wish he didn’t, but Miranda was the only other person who’d known about it. After I’d let him in, told him about you, I just wanted another person who I could share that memory with.”

Thomas waves a hand dismissively. “It does not bother me that he knew about the two of us. It would bother me if you had loved nobody enough to let them in for our entire separation. I merely want to say that if he knew what _Meditations_ meant to you, then _he_ must have known both Flint and McGraw. Loved both as well. And that I would like to do the same.” 

James says nothing. He leans his hands on the rail and looks out over the water. Would it be more unbearable for Thomas to know Flint, or to return Flint to the sea? He cannot know yet.

Thomas covers James’s hand with his own. Several breaths later, James says in low tones, “I think I could let you do that.”

“I’m glad,” Thomas replies softly. “I love you.”

They look out ahead for another long moment before Thomas says, at normal volume, “But we are headed to Silver’s coordinates, are we not?”

“Well, the coordinates are near Nassau anyway. Still on the island. The crew will want to go to Nassau, so it only makes sense—” Thomas gives James another _look_ , and James feels his mouth curve into a half-smile at that familiar expression. “Yes, we are headed to the coordinates. I’ll decide what to say to him when I see him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for nothing, subtitles. “[Speaking native language],” indeed. I couldn’t find any source on what language(s) they’re speaking in the background in the actual show, so after some googling, I found out it’s likely that a bunch of different languages would probably be spoken in a Maroon community like Madi’s. Madi’s mother speaks Sesotho here because Madi is a Sesotho word, and the other languages I picked based on name origins of other characters and research about countries of origin for enslaved people brought through the Bahamas.


	3. XLI

But then James doesn’t see him. For weeks. At the coordinates supplied in the book, James and Thomas find a bay a little ways off from Nassau Town, just far enough that Featherstone and his administration can deny affiliation with the brisk trade in pirated, forged, or otherwise illegal goods done there. It’s all the most fun and least savory parts of Nassau, uprooted to make room for civilized people in town, and replanted here to sprout tents and shacks and stalls like the leaves of some sprawling, alien plant.

It’s also much too small for James to stay there. Almost as soon as he drops anchor in the harbor, he starts hearing John Silver’s name around every corner. There’s no way James can stay where he might have to face Silver so soon. Once Rowley assumes command of the _Ladysmith_ with James’ blessing, James and Thomas bolt for the interior.

And they rest. In short order, Thomas has used some of the takings from the Spanish merchant ship to secure them a small cottage near where Miranda lived. James starts an ambitious undertaking somewhere between a large garden and a small farm on their property, hoping to get some crops in the ground before their funds run out. It’s a stopgap measure, he knows—he can’t hide out here forever, and eventually he’ll have to earn money one way or another, but for now he’s doing his best to avoid anyone who might recognize him. So while Thomas looks for work in town, James plants, and he cooks, and he reads. When Thomas gets home every evening, they talk and laugh and eat James’s cooking and crowd into the wider of the two little beds in the house together. And James is content, most of the time, but . . .

He can’t even see the ocean from their little property. He’d thought that would settle him some, but instead it fills him with an indefinable restlessness. This life makes him _content_ , which had been a synonym for _complacent_ in the dictionary that governed his old life. _Content_ meant he wasn’t achieving anything, meant he should be restless to achieve more. He knows Thomas notices when James starts to feel cooped up here, but James doesn’t know how to talk about this with him.

James goes to Nassau and to the brand-new pirate town a few times, carefully and with a hat pulled low over his face, looking for Madi. She would understand, he knows. From a tall thin man hawking dishware and calico in the shantytown, he learns that she’s sailing, of all things. He just misses her a few more times before giving up, hoping she’ll come to him eventually.

—

Then, a few weeks into his new life, James is digging in the front garden, swearing at a stubborn rock that’s in the way of his intended row of beans, when he hears his name.

“Flint? _Flint!_ ” 

He looks up an instant before Madi crashes into him, wrapping him up in a hug and laughing a small, joyful laugh. “Madi!”

“I’ve missed you!” she says into his shirt. “I heard someone was looking for me, but I could not believe it was you until I saw you.”

“And I missed you,” he tells her, patting her on the back until she releases him, still beaming. She looks the same, except, God, she looks tired. What the hell has she been up to? “Come inside, we can have tea and you can meet Thomas when he gets back from the market.”

Inside, Madi fills him in on her new life while he makes tea, watching him clatter around his cheerful yellow kitchen with a quiet sort of enjoyment. She accepts a delicate porcelain teacup, one of Thomas’s first purchases in town, with thanks and a small smile that seems to wonder that Captain Flint is now the kind of person who owns teacups.

James, for his part, is astonished at her own change in activities. “But _Rackham_ ,” he says for the third time, throwing himself into the kitchen chair across from her. “You’re sailing with _him?_ ”

“People say a lot about him, but he is very intelligent,” she says mildly, ignoring his dismay. “He let himself be persuaded to pick targets for the good of Nassau’s independence. We have waylaid three shipments of cotton and indigo so far, and I have heard that the planters are frantic over this. Besides that, Rackham and Anne Bonny are kind to me. I have befriended her especially, and I am staying with her and Max in town. Anne is the quartermaster now, you know,” she adds, as though as an afterthought.

James shakes his head disbelievingly. “Jesus. We made a pirate of you yet. I’ve no idea if I should be proud or sorry for corrupting you.”

“I learned from the best,” she tells him, mock-seriously. “From the great Captain Flint.”

That name in Madi’s mouth makes something seize at him. It’s the way she speaks it, like Flint is a friend, someone to be trusted. He’s heard the name spoken in fear of him; in anger at his lies and manipulation; even, from Thomas, in curiosity tinged with kindness and trepidation in equal measure. He’s heard it in his dreams, whispered against his skin, bitten against his mouth by someone with a name of his own that makes men tremble just as much as _Flint_. In his dreams, when Flint and Long John Silver come together it is cataclysmic, like dawn after the end of the world breaking onto something entirely new, like monsters turning each other back into men. 

But only from Madi does the name _Flint_ sound as mundane as any other, as fond as the name of a friend.

“Speaking of Captain Flint . . . are you truly retired?”

James hesitates. How to answer that in a way that both is true and feels true, that encompasses both the reality of his days spent in peace and the itch that fills him at every idle moment that tells him _You should still be fighting_? How to answer in a way that won’t hurt Madi, who is still fighting in perhaps the only way now available to her?

“I honestly don’t know,” he says finally. “I dreamed for so long about walking away from the fight, but I don’t know if I can do it. I worry I am abandoning you, abandoning everything we fought for, every time I” — he waves a hand, gesturing around the room — “every time I stand at the fire to cook, or sit in this chair to rest. But I don’t know what’s left of the fight for me either. I feel caught in between the man I was and the man I dreamed of becoming, when I dreamed of leaving Flint behind.”

Madi leans across the table and lays a hand gently over his. “There are ways that you can still fight,” she tells him. “And it does not have to be your whole life, now that the possibility of war is lost. I and Rackham are working to limit the power of the planters. Max and Featherstone are trying to disentangle Nassau from its political obligations to England. Julius is raiding the interior to free those held on the plantations. We can have a truly free Nassau, even if we cannot spread the revolution as widely as we wished.”

James lets his eyes travel over her familiar face. She looks hopeful, like she’s found a place for herself in this new order, but to him, one of her phrases still hangs heavy in the air. “And how do you feel about that?” he asks. “About the possibility of war being lost?” Her words bear the weight of finality on his tongue.

Madi does not answer for a long moment. Her warm expression drops, her gaze going unfocused as she looks out over James’s shoulder and into the distance. “Every time Julius brings people home to us, people with scars on their backs and fear in their eyes, I am enraged,” she says lowly. “But every time men and women, good men and women, die on Julius’s raids, I understand why _he_ took the war away from us. Why he could not bear to see the whole world fall into a fight like that. But I still cannot forgive him.”

For a moment, Silver hangs in the room, his unspoken name making him a palpable presence. A living ghost.

James nods. “I understand.” 

“He is planning something,” Madi says suddenly, like James had never spoken. “I do not know what, but he’s planning something. I hear his name everywhere I go, even though I have not seen him since he told me what he did to you. But the number of times that I have heard men speak his name — good men, men who fought alongside us — it is obvious that he is planning something important.”

The door bangs open and Thomas enters, trying to juggle the door closed again with his arms full of vegetables. “James!” he calls, his face lighting up on seeing their visitor. “You did not tell me that we would have company!”

Then he takes in their expressions. “James, dear, what news did I miss?”

—

Madi spends the next few weeks happily enough. She visits Flint as often as she can. She splits her time ashore between his spare bedroom and Max and Anne’s floor, depending on her mood and on how close she needs to be to port for her next trip on the account.

When Madi wakes one morning, back on the floor of Max and Anne’s front room after returning from such an excursion, the heat of midmorning is already upon them. Max sits at the table, cleaning what must be one of Anne’s knives with a strange gentleness. Madi watches as she lets a tiny drop of oil fall onto the blade and wipes at it with a cloth, rubbing away the grime. Anne, meanwhile, stands at the table, unpacking bread and fresh mangoes from the market. Seeing the two of them together, watching how they go about the patterns of daily life without needing to speak, Madi feels as though she is intruding on something intimate.

Blearily, she sits up and rubs at her eyes. Max must notice the movement, because without looking up from her work, she says with a small smile, “I am glad you rested well. Would you like some breakfast?”

The mangoes look perfectly fresh as Anne sets them on the table, and the bread smells newly baked. Madi absolutely would like some breakfast.

The meal is pleasant, good food and companionable quiet punctuated with brief questions and answers about the raid and about Max’s past few days at work with the governor. But as Madi works on the last of her share of the bread, Max says, “I did not wish to bother either of you last night, but I think you should both know that there is some bad news.”

Anne looks up, her eyebrows knitting together anxiously. 

“Marion Guthrie is dead. And her death, coupled with the concerns of the planters after the last few months of raids, is going to present a problem for us. Her husband has sold their joint interest in Nassau to a,” Max tips her head consideringly, “shall we say, a _keen_ man from London. His name is Lord Christopher Berridge, and he will be coming to inspect Nassau in three weeks’ time.”

“Why is that a problem?” Anne asks, busily prying a bit of mango from its peel. “We’ll just keep away from him while you and Featherstone bullshit him like you do everyone else.”

“I have it on good authority that this particular man will not be so easily convinced that nothing is amiss here. And he is bringing with him a supply of British regulars to support the militia here.”

Madi’s heart drops like a stone. Just when Julius was meeting with such success, just when it seemed like the end of their long campaign to free Nassau was in sight—

“Shit,” says Anne flatly. “All right, Jack and I will leave then. Take some ships on the Carolina coast while we wait for them to leave the island. I’m not fuckin’ with the British Navy again.”

“It’s not just that.” Madi’s voice is sudden in the small room. Max and Anne look at her, surprised. “It is not just the pirates that this will be a problem for. It seems likely to me that the planters called on this man for aid. That they told him that they were losing slaves to raids in untenable numbers, and needed help defending themselves against the raids. Is that correct?”

“It seems to be, yes,” Max replies. She looks troubled, and Madi wonders what it must have been like to know her back when her only struggle for power was over her role in Jack’s brothel. The cares of Nassau, Madi supposes, must have changed her. 

Max clears her throat. “As if that is not enough, it will also be a problem for me. Featherstone and I have formed connections with merchants who trust us, and who are willing to deal directly through us instead of bowing to Nassau’s colonial leadership in London. If this man is allowed to land here with his soldiers and his ideas about Nassau’s duty to England, he will undo every bit of independence that we fought for. That we sacrificed for, to Marion Guthrie.”

“What did you sacrifice to Marion Guthrie?” Madi asks, though she already knows the answer. 

_Flint_.

—

The next time James sees Madi, she comes bearing a slim folio edition of “El Castigo Sin Venganza” as a gift, taken from the captain’s cabin of a guardacosta that had unwisely taken exception to Rackham. They spend an enjoyable evening puzzling over the folio with Thomas, as James’s somewhat neglected Spanish is better suited for hailing enemy ships than for reading great works of tragedy. 

As they near the end of the play, James perches on the arm of Thomas’s armchair by the hearth, leaning into Thomas to see the Spanish dictionary he holds in his lap. Even after weeks, the wonder of this is not lost on him, the wonder of being able to spend an evening reading with his lover and his friend. The wonder of feeling Madi’s eyes on him, full of the warmth of friendship and not the sting of judgement, as Thomas laughs over a mispronounced word and James presses his lips to Thomas’s temple, too full of fondness to respond in words.

Through it all, though, James can tell something is bothering Madi. After what must be the fifth time Madi is too lost in thought to notice him ask for help — this time with the translation of “alnados,” which he is almost certain means either “adopted sons” or “onions,” — he can take it no longer. 

“ _Madi_ ,” he says loudly, aiming for somewhere between “concerned” and “exasperated.” She looks up at him, startled. “Do you want to tell me what’s on your mind?”

She throws a worried look at Thomas. “It’s all right,” Thomas says in answer to her unspoken question. “If it’s something you can worry James about, you can worry me about it too.”

Madi twists the material of her skirt in her hands worriedly. James feels oddly touched to be allowed to witness this; it’s a gesture that gives something away, something that she does not let most people see. When did she start feeling that she could express vulnerability with him, ceasing to play the unflappable princess? He cannot recall. 

“I wanted to wait, so I would not worry you over dinner. But it is something Max told me,” she says eventually, her voice tight with unease. “She says that Marion Guthrie is dead, and with her, her agreement to keep a measure of independence for Nassau.”

“Jesus.” James feels anger lick at his insides, sudden as tinder catching. After he’d spent months in jail so that Max could appease this woman, after he’d nearly been imprisoned for life, had it achieved nothing?

“It is worse than that,” Madi continues softly. “The man who purchased her interest in Nassau has agreed to a request for help from the planters. He is bringing British soldiers back to Nassau to help the planters stop Julius’s raids and Jack’s piracy.”

The white-hot anger in James’s stomach boils over into a sick sensation. This man is bringing the British _back_? Back to _his_ island? “Who the fuck does he think he is?” James growls.

It’s a rhetorical question, but Madi answers anyway. “He’s a lord, from London. His name is Christopher Berridge.”

There’s a dull _thunk_ as Thomas drops his dictionary to the floor. James turns to look at Thomas, whose face has gone slack as he turns up to look at James. “Christ,” he whispers. “That man is my relative.”

“ _What?_ ” That’s all James needs. He’s had quite enough of Thomas’s relatives.

“A distant cousin,” Thomas clarifies, “but my father made him his heir after, well, you know. That would make him the Lord Proprietor of the Bahama Islands by now. I suppose he decided to take even more of an interest.”

“Does Max have any plans to deal with this?” James asks.

Madi shakes her head. “None that she has shared with me, although I would guess she will attempt to achieve cooperation between him and her new government.”

‘It won’t work,” says Thomas. “When I knew him, dear Christopher shared my father’s hatred of anything that smacked of leniency towards pirates, the colonies, or anything else.”

“Fuck.” There’s no vitriol in the curse; James can’t muster anything but despair at the moment. He’d harbored hopes of helping Julius, or Madi and Rackham, once he made up his mind whether fighting the fight would be worth the risk of not making it home to Thomas one day. But to have the choice taken from him, to have his island returned to the tight grip of British rule…

“I had hoped that you could help me plan something. Some way to stop them,” says Madi. 

“We’ll think of something,” he tells her. Though he’s damned if he knows what at the moment.

Unluckily for his odds of getting a good night sleep, Madi has yet more news for him before she takes her leave. At the door, she tells him quietly, “Anne says she has heard that he will be meeting with people tonight, just before midnight. In the little building next to Captain Bowbam’s in the pirate town. Will you go? Find out what he is planning?”

She leaves without waiting for an answer.

But of course he will go. When it’s coming up on the appointed hour, he tells Thomas where he’s going, and gets a “Be safe, love” and a small, worried smile in return. The ride to the shantytown passes like a dream. James hitches his horse to a fence near the edge of town and walks to Captain Bowbam’s.

It’s surprisingly quiet in the little town’s narrow lanes, and even more surprisingly quiet is the rough palm-and-wood building where Silver is supposed to be having his meeting. James is at a loss—he doesn’t plan to go in, he just wanted to listen through the walls or waylay one of the conspirators after the meeting, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone inside.

He leans closer to the door, listening hard. There’s still no sound, not even the gentle noises of someone puttering around a room on their own. Is anyone even in there? Could Bonny have been wrong about the time of the meeting? 

James only has a second of warning, a tiny _tap_ of wood on packed earth, before the door bangs open. A shadowy form lunges out, one hand reaching for a weapon at his belt and the other forearm, the one holding a long piece of wood, going for James’s neck to pin him to the wall beside the door. James ducks away on instinct, but it’s a near thing. He comes up facing the man before him, and the man’s eyes must have adjusted to the dim torchlight that illuminates the alley because—

“ _Flint_.” His name in Silver’s mouth sends a shock through James. His whole body jolts with it as he watches Silver lean an arm against the wall, unsteady on his feet. Silver’s mouth shapes words that need a few more breaths to come out right. “I heard someone listening outside, I thought, I didn’t think it would be _you_ —”

James ignores Silver’s words even as every part of him is singing for him to reach for Silver, or to go for his throat. “Thomas keeps asking me what I plan to say when I see you,” James says, fighting to keep his voice even. “I think he knows that you were important to me, and is anxious that the first time I lay eyes on you again, I don’t gut you where you stand.” _Were_. The past tense hangs in the air between them like a cannonball at the top of its arc. 

It finds its target. Silver’s eyes flick down to the ground, his mouth twisting into a pained expression. James wonders at that, that an unkind word from him still has the power to hurt Silver, even after they’ve tried it with swords. 

“Is that what you were planning on doing?”

“No.” Truth to tell, James doesn’t know what he wants with Silver. Standing before him, the war Silver stole feels more like an abstract ideal and less like the lifeblood it was to James during all those months he fought for it. What cuts deeper in this moment is the personal betrayal. The fact that he trusted Silver, even loved him, when all the while Silver planned his undoing. “I didn’t mean to see you. I just wanted to find out what you were planning. Madi wanted to know,” he adds unnecessarily. 

“Is she here?” Silver’s eyes dart over James’s shoulder as though he might be hiding her somewhere.

“No. Unlike me, she still never wants to see you again.”

“And you do?”

“I haven’t made up my mind.”

“Well.” Silver ducks his head. His eyes keep flicking to James’s and away again, as if afraid of what he will read in James’s expression. “You may as well come in, if you want to know what I’m planning. As long as you’ve decided not to gut me just yet.”

He pushes off the wall and leads James through the door.

Inside, a small fire and several candles illuminate a little room with a cot on one side and a table and chairs on the other. They also illuminate Silver, and James sucks in a breath as his eyes rove over Silver’s face. Jesus, he looks bad. A mottled bruise blooms over one cheek, and the purple half-moons under his eyes tell the story of weeks of fitful sleep. James should feel some satisfaction at this, that this man who abandoned him has suffered in his absence, but he feels only sorrow.

Silver’s hair is still long and wild, but his beard is little more than stubble now, a combination that leaves James unsure of which version of Silver stands before him. Silver’s face seems to change in the shifting firelight, so that James feels as though he’s looking at first the thief with the quicksilver smile, then at Long John Silver, the pirate king.

When they are both seated at the table, Silver pours them each a drink, then says carefully into his cup, “I will apologize to Madi. I will not apologize to you.” 

James scoffs. “Bold thing to say to someone you betrayed. Especially someone who hasn’t made up his mind what to do with you yet.”

It’s an empty threat, and judging by the way Silver’s posture is loose and unready for a fight, he knows it. Silver sets his cup down and meets James’s eye. “You know you would have doomed us all with your war. I will not apologize for stopping it. But I could not have lived with myself if you had _died_ to stop it.”

James takes a deep draught from his cup. It’s wine, terrible but strong, that coats his tongue with a bitter taste. “Getting me and Thomas out of chains, that seemed an awful lot like an apology.”

“It was not. It was just . . . an attempt to make things right.”

 _Make things right how?_ James wonders. By orchestrating James’s release? Or by returning him home to Silver? “You told me where to find you,” he says softly. “When you left me that note, what were you thinking?”

“I was wondering if I was right about you.” 

Silver’s deflecting. Like he always does. But James will let this play out, let Silver tell him what he needs to. “And were you?”

“No.” Silver swallows. “When I left you in that prison cell in Port Royal, you were—you were the man I knew. You stormed at me. Raged. And you had full cause to do so. But as I continued to ensure that you heard about the preparations for Thomas’s arrival, for your removal to Savannah, I kept hearing reports about you. Reports that you were . . . changed. When Max went to see you, she told me it was like you had woken up from a nightmare, like the last ten years were gone.”

Silver pauses to refill their cups, hands full of restless energy, collecting himself. He takes another swallow before he continues. “The last time Madi let me see her, I told her that I had unmade Captain Flint, that you were James McGraw once more. So when I left you the note, I wanted to see if that was true. If you turned your back on the sea, traded a life in peace with Thomas for your life on the account, I thought that would mean that I was right. That you were McGraw again. If you came back to me, whether to kill me or to return to the account, I thought that would mean you were . . . something else.”

“So you thought you had succeeded in unmaking me?” Silver nods, and James lets out a long breath. “Well. You were wrong, but you’re not to be blamed for that. Even I thought that Flint was something I could leave behind. Thomas reminded me that he’s always been too much a part of me to abandon.”

Damn. Here he is, talking about Flint again, when the only thing he’s interested in talking about is Silver. So that’s unchanged, then, the slipperiness with which Silver steers every conversation away from himself. But James makes an effort.

“What about you? What about _Long John Silver_?” He lets irony drip from the epithet, and Silver flinches. 

“Don’t say that,” he says quietly. “I don’t use that name anymore when I can help it. And we’re past that, between us. Past those titles.”

Maybe. Maybe they are. But there are a lot of other things between them that cannot pass so easily. 

The fire crackles beside them, a burst of sparks illuminating Silver’s face, creating stark shadows under his cheekbones, a warm glow in his skin. He’s still very beautiful, even tired and bruised and worn-looking, James thinks, almost weary with the realization of it. What good does it do him now, to consider the loveliness of Silver? Silver, who could never acknowledge what they were to each other, even at the time that James would have fought and died for him?

The knife that Silver had stuck into his chest all those months ago digs a little deeper, and suddenly, James doesn’t know how to guard his expression anymore. Doesn’t know how to pretend that he means Silver any harm. He has no idea what story his expression is telling, but whatever Silver reads there makes him reach across the table. When he lays a warm hand awkwardly on James’s forearm, James feels the heat of him through his shirtsleeve like a brand. “I told you then that I didn’t want to betray you,” Silver says lowly. “It wasn’t a lie then, and it isn’t a lie now.” 

“Wasn’t it?” James asks, his voice unsteady. The feel of Silver’s hand on his arm pulls him off balance, somehow, bringing up memories of fights, bringing up memories of a hand lingering on his shoulder just too long to be casual. Both devastating in their own way. “You took an awful lot from me, for someone who claims never to have wanted to hurt me.”

Silver looks down at the fire. When he speaks again, his voice sounds far away. Like the beginning of a story that will somehow end with an answer for James. “He kept coming back to me,” he says quietly to the fire. “Israel Hands. I don’t know if he still had faith that I could be some pirate king, or if he just needed someone else to serve after Teach, or what, but he kept coming back to me after the war. Saying the same things he’d been whispering in my ear since I met him. That I could lead Nassau. That I was still here because I was stronger than you ever were. That I had ended your war because I was the better man.”

Silver breathes in. “When I shot him in the neck, he took a long time to die.” James’s head jerks up so he can meet Silver’s eye again. There’s a glimmer behind his eyes, a spark of challenge. “A few minutes, at least. I sat in this chair the whole time, watching him. I’d like to say that I did it out of some greater motive for the good of Nassau, but that isn’t true. The whole time he was dying, all I could think was how good it felt to shut him up at last. Keep him from talking about you ever again.”

James swallows. Jesus. How to take that, the knowledge that Silver would still kill for him? Silver, who nearly had James killed all those months ago. Who tried to throw him against a wall as soon as he laid eyes on him tonight. 

Silver, whose body is still canted towards him as if in a silent plea to stay, to trust him. Whose eyes hold James’s steadily, whose mouth is stained pink with wine.

Fuck. Despite his best intentions, James needs to kiss him as badly as he needs to breathe. 

Silver clutches at his arm harder, and this time it doesn’t unbalance James, it feels like an anchor to something. “Flint, please believe I want for you whatever you want. You can’t have your war back, but if you need to fight, I have a fight for you. And if you need to walk away and never see me again, I will let you go.”

With difficulty, James collects himself. Makes himself focus on Silver’s eyes, not his mouth. Has Silver seen? 

Did he ever see? Did Silver know that when he’d admitted he’d stolen the Urca gold, Flint had felt something charged between them, had wanted to light the charge and press his lips to Silver’s sharklike smile? Did he see the dangerous softness James had felt toward Silver, when James had shown nothing but a hard shell to everyone else?

Silver’s still looking at him. James determinedly drags himself back to the subject at hand. “What fight do you have for me?” James asks.

“In three weeks’ time, a warship full of British regulars is going to land in the harbor, and a man eager to see them bring order to the interior and bring Nassau back into the fold of colonial rule will be at their head.”

“Yes, I know, Madi’s told me.” James pushes his sleeves up past his elbows against the heat of the fire. He watches Silver’s gaze flick down to James’s bared forearms as James reaches for his cup again. Watches his eyes linger there as James lifts the cup to his mouth.

His blood thrums with a warmth that has nothing to do with the wine.

James clears his throat. “I’m helping Madi plan —”

“It won’t work.”

“You don't even know what we’re planning yet!”

“Yes, but I know it won’t work.” Silver leans forward even further in his chair, still holding his eyes, still demanding his attention. He’s wearing the small smile that makes men listen to him, and even though he knows this is partly for show, James feels himself being drawn in. “From what I’ve heard of him, this man, this Lord Berridge, will not be easily dissuaded from landing his troops by politics, or manipulation, or threats. We cannot let his men even leave their ship, or he will be too ready to use them to bring Nassau to heel. And to my mind, there’s only one clear way to do that.”

James is done playing into Silver’s stories. He’s done. But his designated line escapes his mouth against his will. “And what is that?”

“We’re going to bring you back from the dead.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1-"alnados" is an archaic word for "stepsons," and "el castigo sin venganza" slaps. I like to think that Flint, Thomas, and Madi enjoy both sides of the de Vega-Cervantes feud.  
> 2-whoever was the first person to say "Silver doesn't know how to interpret his feelings for Flint, so Hands can make Silver mistake his love for Flint for the feeling that he's being manipulated" owns my entire ass


	4. XLII

“It is obvious that this is an apology to you.” 

Flint’s voice sounds unnaturally loud in the room in back of a tavern near Max and Anne’s place. The noise from the street barely filters back into this dusty room, and the light fares no better, as the windows face the wrong way to let in the afternoon sun. 

Madi stays silent. It _does_ seem like an apology to her, for Silver to have intelligence about a threat to Nassau even before Max, and for him to spend weeks concocting a plan to resist it. The opportunity to turn away the Lord Proprietor and his enforcers for good, to leave her home island safer, the plantations vulnerable to attack, and Nassau almost fully independent — it is as if Silver had designed the perfect gift for her and brought it to her wrapped in gold paper.

 _We will stand together against you_ , this plan says to Berridge, to England. _I’m sorry. I love you_ , it says to Madi.

“An apology to who?” Jack Rackham sweeps into the room, his smart custard-colored coat trailing behind him. Out of the corner of her eye, Madi sees Flint’s hands clench into fists at Jack’s arrival. She kicks Flint lightly under the table, catching his eyes in a warning. Be nice.

“That's not something you need to know,” Flint replies, resentment audible in his voice.

“No need to take that tone,” says Jack as he slides into a seat across from them, though he sounds slightly worried. “You stole my cache, I put you in prison, and now we’re on the same side again. I think that makes us even, although don’t think I’ve forgotten about the money.”

Rackham’s bravado falters visibly under Flint’s glare. Flint growls something unintelligible under his breath, and Madi and Jack both pretend not to notice.

“Even or not,” says Madi, deliberately projecting calm, “this plan will require both of you for it to work best, so it is better if you behave like allies and not children.”

“Yes, what is this plan that I’ve heard so much about?” asks Jack. “I can’t get up to take a shit without passing five people talking about Silver recently, when is he going to tell us what this is all about?”

Madi and Flint glance at each other simultaneously. Jack scoffs slightly. “I see. I take your little” — he waves a hand between them — “ _knowing glances_ to mean that he’s not coming?”

“No,” Madi replies. “He has told Flint his plan, and we are more than capable of meeting with you without him.”

She does not say, _He is not here because I cannot see him yet. Because I must take this plan as his attempt to return Flint and me to the narrative that he stole from us, the story that he told about us without our consent. But I do not have to forgive him_. 

Madi opens her mouth to speak, but before she can, two more men come trooping into the room, making far more noise than only two men should be able to. Cooper and Rowley, she assumes, and Flint’s lack of surprise confirms it. 

“Christ,” groans Jack, as they take the two remaining chairs. “ _These_ upstarts?”

“ _Upstarts_?” begins the shorter of the two men, bristling. She thinks he’s Cooper, from Flint’s description. The other man, appearing more cowed by the presence of Captain Jack Rackham, pulls Cooper back into his seat with a warning glare. 

“What else do you call someone who tried to steal a prize out from under you and then let it get away?” Jack asks, looking down his nose at them affectedly. “And it’s no wonder, since your flag doesn’t exactly strike fear into the hearts of men, either.”

“These fine men are here because we need them,” Madi interjects. She favors them with a tiny smile, both to calm the one who’s still visibly fuming and because anyone who can get Jack pontificating about pirate flags is a free source of entertainment. 

“Yeah, he said that earlier,” says Rowley, jerking his head at Flint, “but why?”

“More precisely, we need your ship,” Madi replies, hoping she can convey enough authority that they don’t see how much she’s asking for.

Rowley leans back in his chair, keeping his face blank as he fixes Madi with a _look_. “That’s a pretty big favor.”

Damn.

Flint leans forward, forearms flat on the table. Madi admires this, the way he presses into Rowley’s space, shifting the dynamic of the conversation. “You owe me.” Flint’s mild tone conveys danger below it, like sharks beneath still water.

Rowley gives a short nod, giving up some ground, and asks, “What’s it for? You said something about the British?”

Madi keeps careful watch on Rowley, Cooper, and Jack’s faces as she explains the Lord Proprietor’s plan to land troops and bring Nassau back under his control. Jack, she knows, will be an easy sell—Max told her that she’d already discussed the Lord Proprietor with Jack, and Jack doesn’t want his sacrifices for Nassau undone any more than Max does. Even Rowley and Cooper, though, look convinced, perhaps by Flint’s silent support of her or by Jack’s nods of agreement. Or perhaps by her reputation in its own right.

“All right,” says Cooper finally. “We’ll talk to the men, but I think we can sell them on letting you command them in this, as long as your plan’s sound enough.”

That’s Flint’s cue to take over. From an inner pocket of his coat, he removes a chart of the coastline around the town. “Essentially,” he says, “we don’t want to plan on a direct assault, so we need to surprise Berridge. He’ll try to drop anchor here” — Flint jabs a finger at a spot on the map — “because it’s the deepest water closest to shore, the best place for a ship and crew of that size to make landing. Jack, you’ll take your ship behind the fort here, so that you’ll be out of sight. Just before he comes into the bay, you’ll have to block him from entering where he’ll want to. I want you and Bonny to be as visible and recognizable as possible, so be on the upper deck.

“Madi, John Silver, and I will be doing much the same on your ship,” he continues, nodding to Rowley and Cooper. “We’ll come from behind the merchant ship that will be docked here, so we should be able to get in behind him and pin him down between the merchant ship and Jack’s.”

“What’s the point of all this?” Jack asks, skeptical. “It seems like you have very specifically worked out a plan to—what, get Berridge to recognize us?”

Madi breaks in impatiently. “He is not finished telling you the plan. Yes, the plan is for him to recognize us, for him to fear us. We want him to think not that he has undone all of our work to free Nassau, but that we have undone all of Woodes Rogers’ work to subdue it. That the most famous pirates in the New World are back from the dead. That every resident of the island stands with them and ready to turn him back. We want Berridge to believe that if he truly wants Nassau, he will have to work as hard and sacrifice as much as Woodes Rogers did, and that we will undo his work just as easily even then.”

Flint nods appreciatively at her. “If our show of force gets him to surrender when we raise the black, so much the better. If we have to stand and fight, well. Silver has been recruiting from the new pirate resistance, so we will have the men to reinforce our two crews. We want to talk to him ourselves, to impress upon him what a mistake it will be to stand against us. But the key is to keep him from ever landing his men in Nassau. If he does, it will be too easy for him to use them to move against us, and in favor of the planters, where we are weakest.”

Rowley and Cooper look convinced, but Jack frowns at that last statement. “And if he does land his men? If he’s just as determined as Rogers that English law should rule here?”

“It won’t come to that.” Flint sounds assured, but Madi knows him too well to be fooled: he’s worried about that himself. After all, this is essentially a bluff. They are nowhere near as prepared to stand and fight as they were with Rogers, no matter what they are trying to convey to the new Lord Proprietor. 

“But if it does?” Jack prods.

“It will not. Silver has something up his sleeve to ensure that it does not. And if it does come to that, you will have no obligation to help us fight him off. You can go back to plotting with Max and the governor.”

The rest of the meeting is uneventful as they work out a few finer details of the plan. When the other men leave, Madi asks Flint, “What does Silver have up his sleeve?”

“I made that up,” Flint admits. “But he always does have something.”

—

Flint is wrong about Silver, Madi decides the next day. Not about Silver always having something up his sleeve, which is true, but about whom he intends the plot against the Lord Proprietor as an apology to. 

Just as much as this plot is a gift to Madi, with its intended effects of leaving her island free and allowing Julius’s raids to continue, it is a gift to Flint as well. Flint has walked differently since meeting with Silver in the pirate town, Madi has realized. He walks like Captain Flint again, not like a man ducking his head, trying not to be noticed, trying to figure out who he still is. Silver has put him in command again, given him another fight to win for his island.

In giving Flint command of the ship that Silver is to sail on, Silver has cast himself once more as Flint’s right hand. That can’t be an accident, Madi knows. That, too, is part of the apology.

She has always wondered if Silver understands what is between him and Flint as well as she. To her, it has always been obvious, from the way the two of them had fit together, had worried about each other, had acted as one. She had tried to bring it up with Silver back when they were together, but Silver had shaken her off, too enmired in the idea that he or Flint would prove each other’s downfall. Or perhaps just unwilling to open his eyes to the fact that he had loved Flint. 

It was, unfortunately for the both of them, even more obvious after the thing between them had broken. Just as Silver had thrown away the war out of love for her, Flint had let Silver take away the war rather than bring himself to kill Silver. 

God. What a group the three of them were, showing love by betrayal.

“Uh. Miss Madi.”

Cooper’s voice snaps her out of her reverie. “Yes?”

“Are you gonna do anything with that paint? Only, if you aren’t, I can do it?”

She blinks. She’s been standing on the beach on her mother’s island for who knows how long, apparently staring into the space where Jack’s and Rowley’s ships were careened on the sand. “Yes, fine,” she mutters, surrendering the bucket of black paint in her hands to Cooper, who peers at her curiously but heads off toward his ship without further comment. 

As she looks on, men from both crews, her island, and Silver’s pirate resistance bustle around the ships, securing ropes, scraping shipworm off the hulls, and even doing a key bit of painting. Under Madi’s gaze, the _Ladysmith_ is painted over with the name of the poor destroyed _Walrus_ , and Rackham’s big ship is getting some gold-colored trim and the name of the _Revenge_. It’s not as large or powerful as his old warship, of course, but Berridge had never seen the _Revenge_ anyway. It’s just another bit of trickery meant to make him despair of being right back where Woodes Rogers had started. Rackham is overseeing the work, wincing as a careless hand slops gold paint over the rail, and Thomas has his tongue between his teeth as he carefully outlines the _s_ in _Walrus_.

Squinting against the sun, Madi lets her eyes drift further down the beach. A ways off, there’s a figure silhouetted against the clouds on a cliff above the sand. A figure leaning against a crutch.

Hiking up to the cliff gives Madi a long time to dissect her own rationale for going to see Silver alone after all these months, but she doesn’t use it. She doesn’t know if she’s headed back towards him to shout at him or to hear him out again. To remind herself that he is unforgivable, to try to forgive him, or just to hurt herself.

She’s panting slightly by the time she reaches the clifftop, so she stops for a moment to get her breath back and compose herself. Silver’s back is hunched slightly as he stares out over the water, as if he is braced to receive a blow.

Madi must make a noise, because he turns. At the sight of his face, she knows that if she had taken all the time in the world to prepare what to say to him, she would have forgotten it in that instant. His mouth turns up very slightly in the smile of someone who cannot believe that he has been allowed this small hope. Of a condemned man who has just heard whisperings that he may be spared.

“Madi,” he breathes. He takes a step toward her. She holds her ground, keeps her expression guarded. “What does this mean?”

Madi doesn’t know what she’s going to say until the words are out of her mouth. “Did you plan this for me?” 

She knows he did, but she wants to hear him say it. Wants to decide whether this plan to stop the Lord Proprietor counts as an apology if it was meant _only_ as an apology, planned as a gesture to her and to Flint, rather than out of a belief in what they fought for.

“Yes,” he admits, so softly that the wind nearly steals his words. Almost unconsciously, Madi steps closer to hear him, beginning to close the few yards between them. She does not trust herself to be any closer than this. “All of this, the new pirate resistance, our efforts to help the raids, this”— he gestures down to the ships on the beach — “I did for you. Not because I thought it would make you forgive me, but to undo some of what I have done to hurt you. To hurt your cause.”

“Good.” Madi stays very still. She feels as though everything she felt throughout their relationship, the love and the companionship and the betrayal, has been condensed into this single moment. If she moves, if she even breathes wrong, every emotion will come spilling out at once. “It is the least that you can do, after everything that you took away from us. From me, from this island, from the people we would have freed.”

“I know,” Silver says, in a voice still unbearably soft, heavy with some indiscernible emotion. “Please believe me that even when I betrayed you, I did it out of love for you. Better that you raged against me for the rest of your life than that you died in the fight, I thought.” 

He takes another few steps toward Madi, and she can feel herself swaying in his direction, almost against her will. “In my life I have lived amid war, Madi.” The admission of this piece of his past seems dearly given, seems to shrink him somewhat. He turns away from her, considering the cliffs. “The kind where there are no victories, only victims. I could not bear to let you and Flint set the world on fire, and to see you die in the flames along with so many others.”

“ _I could_.” Her voice is harsh even to her own ear, fierce with the strength of her conviction. “I still could. If it meant justice.” In her mind’s eye, she sees Naomi dying in a raid, her father shot trying to deliver others to safety, her cousin who was killed in Rogers’ attack on her island. So many others that she had lost. But unlike Silver, she honors their memories by continuing their fight for them. 

“I know you could,” says Silver lowly. 

“Do you know?” Madi asks. “Do you know that what you took from me is a hundred times worse than what you took from Flint? You only took his freedom and his home. His abstract ideals about freedom. From me, you took something far more concrete. This was no mere pirates’ war. This was a war so that no man or woman would ever be bought or sold again.” She’s angry. God, she’ll always be angry. But standing here, she wants more and more to let her anger with Silver exist only in her past, in their past together. She wants to take the fight Silver is handing her like a torch and use it to burn all the dark parts out of the world.

And she wants him to see what he’s helped her burn, and to see that her work is _good_.

“That’s why I’m trying to give this fight back to you.” Silver looks bent with the weight of this, with what he’d done. “To free those in Nassau and to keep England far from your doorstep. An apology would never be enough, if I did not try to fix this in the only way I know how. It’s not your war, but I was hoping that we might work together, at least until this is over. And then I will step back, and you may make of your fight whatever you can.”

He takes another step closer, and she lets him. Only a few feet remain between them. “You would have been enough for me,” he tells her. “But I would not have been enough for you. I don’t think that we were ever going to be a match for each other, but I loved you anyway. I still love you, even though I broke what was between us.”

Silver looks up at Madi.

She is so close to him now.

Unexpectedly, Madi thinks of Anne, then. The way Max betrayed her, took away her fight, nearly took away the use of her hands. The way they move with each other now, fitting into each other’s space as if what was between them had never broken.

She doesn’t think that can ever be true of her and Silver. But she wants to try to make _something_ true of them once more, that they may be spoken of together. _Madi and Silver_. Like two parts of some wondrous machine, made differently, made for different purposes, but nevertheless made to fit together.

Up on the cliff, Madi closes the last of the distance between them to take Silver’s arm. Even through his shirtsleeve, the warmth of him settles her the way he has always settled her, making her feel more at home in her skin, in her title, in her relationship to him. They turn together in silence and head back down the cliffs. Anyone watching them, Madi knows, would be unable to tell whether she was leaning on him, or he was leaning on her.

—

Julius sets his spoon down with a gentle _tap_.

The noise shakes Madi from her thoughts, which have been about—well, not much. It’s just past sunset and she’s settled in around a fire on the beach with Julius, Flint, Rackham, Anne, and Thomas, all of them bone-tired in a way that crowds out any thought as they tuck into plates of stew fragrant with stolen spices. It’s been a long day of work of all kinds, from meetings to ship repair, and Madi’s glad of the opportunity to sit and think about nothing for a bit.

But from the way Julius is shifting warily in his seat, eying the other faces in the firelight, that quiet seems unlikely to last.

He stands. Madi catches Flint’s eye from across the fire, noticing the worried knit to his eyebrows, before she turns to look up at Julius.

Julius clears his throat. “I have decided,” he says in that matter-of-fact soldier’s tone of his, “that my men will not be accompanying you on this mission. We’ll help you finish preparing, but that’s as far as we’ll go.”

Damn. It makes sense, Madi knows. It’s one thing for Julius to accept the help of Silver’s pirate resistance for Julius’s own ends, but quite another to risk his men’s lives for a dangerously direct assault on the British, in a plan he had no hand in making. It’s a loss for sure, but she’s been talking to Flint, and she knows they can weather it. She hopes they can weather it.

Across the fire, Rackham opens his mouth indignantly. That can’t end well. 

“I can’t say,” says Flint mildly, effectively cutting off whatever was about to come out of Rackham’s mouth, “that I don’t wish you’d decided differently, but I understand. It’s no reason you can’t stay and drink with us tonight, though.” Flint produces a large, dark bottle of something strong, and proffers it to Julius.

Julius studies him for a moment, and Madi knows he’s trying to decide whether this is a kindness or an attempt at manipulation. Madi slides over a bit to give him more room to sit down, and pats the spot next to her. “Stay,” she says quietly. “We appreciate your help, and we still want your company.” After a moment, Julius nods, sits back down, and takes the bottle.

One sip from the bottle, which turns out to contain an unnecessarily good spiced rum, melts the silence among them into tentative chat. Several sips in, and the conversation somehow turns to revenge stories. Jack, waving the bottle for emphasis until rum sloshes over a protesting Anne, regales them with the time he and Anne dressed up as gentry to get a double-dealing merchant jailed for shipping the very stolen goods they’d sold him. “And I’d do it again,” he concludes, “if not for the fact that Anne would murder me in my bed if I suggested she wear that gown again.” Anne gives a half-smile and a pleased nod.

With each new story, Madi braces for the worst. These people have survived enslavement, abuse, war, and betrayal; surely their revenge stories are just as painful. But somehow the stories stay relatively lighthearted, stories fit for boasts and laughs among compatriots, rather than tales of trauma and destruction. Madi relaxes by degrees as Thomas coaxes half of his own story from Flint. Thomas’s smile is mischievous and Flint’s is fond as Thomas talks of replacing the hats of a political rival with identical hats either too small or too large, “until he left for Bath to take the waters and recover his sanity,” Flint finishes, with a flicker of a grin he hides in his next sip of rum.

Then Julius starts, and with an admirable effort keeps a straight face through his tale of small revenge on those on Madi’s island who whispered about him in languages he doesn’t speak. Madi’s heart clenches to hear the beginning of this tale—she knows it hasn’t been easy for him to find community on the island—but Julius’s delivery makes her grin when he talks of teaching insults in his mother’s language to the children of people who gave him trouble. His straight face only breaks when he describes the parents finding out what their children were saying, and everyone collapses into helpless laughter.

It’s a perfect tableau, Madi notices through her giggles: Jack leaning back half into Anne’s lap with his head thrown back in laughter, Flint with his hand braced on Thomas’s knee and a broad grin, Julius looking pleased as he lets Anne swipe the bottle from his loose grip.

But it’s only perfect for an instant. 

A footstep on the sand alerts Madi to a presence behind her. She turns to see Silver. The nauseous mix of caution and elation that she’s grown accustomed to feeling around him hits her in an instant, jolting her as though it’s been injected under her skin. An eyeblink later, and she sees his face. Blood trails from his nose halfway down his neck, glinting sickly in the firelight. His eyes are in shadow, but as he steps into the light, Madi sees that one of them is freshly blacked and swelling. Her breath catches, and the roil of emotions in her stomach spills over into righteous anger. 

“Jesus,” says Flint softly. Madi casts her gaze back to him, and sees her anger reflected in his flashing eyes, sees tension identical to hers simmer in his newly rigid posture. 

“What happened?” Madi asks. Her hands flutter in her lap, wanting to offer help, not trusting either of them to let her give it.

“Anders.” Silver’s voice sounds rough, unsteady. He’s leaning heavily on his crutch in a way that tears Madi in two, one part itching to reach for him and help keep him standing, the other desperate to go after the man who’d taken a swing at him. “He told me . . . what was it he said?” Silver asks, an ironic twist to his mouth. “Oh yes: ‘You’re fuckin’ crazy if you think I’m dying for some washed-up captains and their island.’ Says he sailed with Teach, knows better than to fight for Nassau. And . . .” Silver sighs. “He took half of Rowley’s men with him when he left. Along with what passes for my good looks.”

“ _Christ_ ,” says Rackham bitterly. “Not that I don’t sympathize, but I’m less worried about your good looks than losing _half Rowley’s crew_. How did they even get off the island?”

“Got word to another captain, who picked them up, apparently,” Silver replies. “I caught them just before their last longboat left the bay. I apologize for letting them leave.” He’s looking from Flint to Madi now, something indefinable in his eyes. “But in the moment, I just couldn’t find words good enough to keep them there.”

Flint lurches in his seat, a sudden movement like he wants to go help Silver, but he stays where he is as Silver lowers himself unsteadily to sit by Madi.

“We can still do it,” she says quietly. She turns to Flint for assurance that she’s right, but it’s an assertion, not a question. They only have one chance to pull this off, regardless of the number of men on their side. “Without Julius. Without Anders.” Julius shifts in his seat. Flint nods. Holds her gaze, his own expression still reflecting hers.

“ _Well_ ,” says Anne brusquely, and the moment breaks. She offers Silver the rum as he swipes blood from his face with the back of his hand. “Since we’ve decided we’re still gonna make this awful decision, let’s go back to drinking.”

“We were talking about revenge,” Thomas offers. Silver glances at him, surprised. “Well, stories of small revenge, at least.”

“In that case,” Silver replies, taking a swallow of rum, “let me tell you about my time in St. John’s Home for Poor Orphan Boys. There was this one boy, by the unfortunate name of Solomon Little. . .”

He’s slipped so far into his storytelling voice that Rackham, Anne, Julius, and Thomas are all raptly focused on him. Only Madi can hear Flint sigh, can meet his gaze once more to share a rueful look. Only they know that the home for boys is no true part of Silver’s story. That for whatever reason, he feels the need to lie once again.

—  
He’s always in Madi’s dreams these days. In places he shouldn’t be, because he’s never been there: standing in her mother’s house, or rowing the boat that brought her to the island for the first time, or floating with his foot several inches in the air and his crutch leaning on nothing. In places he shouldn’t be, even though he has been there in life: standing at her side, or lying, undressed and rumpled and leonine, in her bed. These dreams strike her as wrong, somehow, even the ones that are more memory than invention. It’s as wrong to dream of him floating in midair as it is to dream of him lying beneath her, reaching up to pull her in for a long kiss. No matter that she still feels the heat of his mouth on hers when she wakes. It feels wrong to dream of him in any of these places.

It’s that feeling that fills her when she steps into Flint’s cabin aboard the newly-christened _Walrus_ the night before the assault on the Lord Proprietor and finds Silver alone in the room, leaning on the desk. True, he’s not floating, but she’s still filled with that dreamlike sense that there is something deeply incorrect about this man in this place.

“I’m sorry, I meant to speak with Flint,” she says, once she gets over her surprise at his presence.

“You’ll find him on deck, I’m afraid.” Silver’s head is tipped towards the ground. The few small lanterns that illuminate the room throw stark shadows under his brow. He does not meet her eyes. “Thinking about strategy or missing Thomas or making peace with himself, whatever he does before battles, I suppose. I never really figured out his rituals, myself.”

Madi’s weight shifts forward and back on her feet as she decides whether to stay or go. She really does have a question for Flint, but—

Silver looks just like he used to when he was alone with her. His mouth soft, his posture uncertain. Like he lets a veil fall away before her. Like he trusts her to see him as a man, not a myth, and not to use this softness against him. 

They’ve spoken since that day on the cliffs, of course, but it has just been business. They talk strategy with Flint and the other captains; they give orders to the men in concert. They do not touch, except for when Madi allows him to lean on her, trying her best to imagine that the press of his hand on her shoulder means no more to her than it should. Since she has only seen him in public since that day on the cliffs, she has only seen Long John Silver. She has been safe from the vulnerability of the man she once knew.

She does not feel safe now.

Madi walks over to lean on the desk on his left side, so that they face out toward the cabin door together. “What have you been doing since the war?” It’s not the question that she means to ask, but once it’s out of her mouth, she realizes she needs to know the answer. “Aside from planning all this.”

He gives a short, mirthless laugh. “Drinking, mostly. Keeping to myself, so that my name continues to be frightening, and not the name of a man whose enemies keep seeing him in the street and deciding that they’ll feel better once they give him a black eye. I never wanted to be a pirate king, but it turns out I like being this even less. I feel like a spider, hiding away and pulling at strings.”

“I know what strings you’ve been pulling,” Madi says quietly. “You’ve been helping Julius on his raids.” 

He turns sharply towards her, but she keeps her gaze fixed ahead. “Why?” she asks.

Silver shoves off the desk and turns. He spends a few moments clearing a spot on the desk to sit, as if to give himself time to respond. Madi waits as he clears papers away and settles on the desk. “Several reasons, I suppose,” he says finally. “To make it up to you, and to put things right with your cause, to the extent that I can. Why, what have you been doing since the war?”

He’s skating over some other reason. She can tell by the way his veil goes back up, separates the two of them, his tone slipping back into one of forced casualness. But she wants to answer anyway. “I’ve been traveling,” Madi replies. “On the account with Rackham and Anne Bonny, as you know. But also visiting my father’s old contacts, around the islands and further. Before I decided to sail with Rackham, I wanted to know if any of those contacts or their networks might be stirred to action. To continue the war, in some smaller way.”

“And could they?”

Madi’s gaze goes unfocused as she calls to mind the faces, scared or angry or just beaten down, that she saw through her months of travel. “Perhaps. But it would have taken more serious effort to organize and stir them than I had the capacity for at the time. I was just angry, and sitting and planning would not have settled me. Sitting and planning would only have given my mother reason to see that I was fit to come home and lead, which I was not ready for either.”

Silver nods. “Sailing with Rackham has settled you, then?”

“Yes,” Madi admits. “Being surrounded by men who judge me only on my ability to help take a prize, who let me fight and protect me no more than they protect each other, it has helped. Being directly responsible for losses to the plantations of New Providence Island, for making the planters afraid and powerless, it has helped. But the time for this kind of action has passed for me. When this is over, I will still do my best to help Julius free those held on this island, but I will turn back toward organizing rebellion among my father’s networks.”

“You would have your war in miniature, then.” There is something indefinable in Silver’s voice. The veil is slipping once again. Without his falseness creating a barrier between them, she feels herself leaning towards him. If she shifts a hairsbreadth, her hip will knock sideways into his thigh, her hand will brush his where they both have their fingers pressed to the desk behind them. She holds herself very still.

“Yes. Are you bothered by that?” Madi has no idea what the answer will be. Silver took her war to save her life, but here he is, giving her a pitched battle as an apology. Giving her a place to make a stand.

“I should be. I am bothered by the idea that I cannot keep you safe, but I know you will make your own choices, with or without me. As perhaps I should have let you do from the beginning. I promise not to stand in your way when you make your choices this time.”

There’s silence for a moment. Against her better judgement, Madi believes him. What is the fight she will win tomorrow if not proof that he means this promise? She lets the moment hang, then says into the silence, “You helped Julius with his raids for another reason.”

“Yes,” Silver admits. He lets out a long breath. “Flint once tried to keep me on his crew by asking me”—he lifts his chin, says in a bitter echo of Flint’s voice—“‘Where else would you wake up in the morning and _matter_?’” He drops his chin again, and his voice is purely his own now. No hint of Flint, no hint of Long John Silver. “Jesus, Madi. The only time in my life that I _liked_ myself, it was when I was the one who could keep Flint’s crew in line. When I was the one who could keep the alliance between your people and mine together. That was the only time in my life when my skills, such as they are, were of use to any man or any cause. Leading some men against the militia to help Julius—it’s cold comfort when only a small circle of men follow me and the rest would kill me if they had half a chance, but it’s a way that I can _matter_ again. To those men, to the ones Julius saves, to myself.”

Madi turns toward him finally, facing him where he perches on the desk. There is only a foot of room between them, and she feels his pull on her like gravity. “You do not have to be a leader of men to matter to me,” she says, so soft that it feels like a confession.

“No?” Silver’s voice is hopeful, his body curving toward her.

“What you have done, in taking the war from me, is unforgivable.” He flinches, but she isn’t finished. She plants her hands on the desk on either side of him, waits until he looks her in the eye again. “But I do not need to forgive you to move past this. I understand why you did it. If you keep your word, I will come to trust that you will never do it again, no matter how far I choose to take this fight. And I love you. That is enough.”

Silver’s mouth drops slightly open, the last of the barrier between them coming down at her words. If the ship were on fire, Madi thinks wildly, she would not be able to tear her eyes away from his, from his open and unguarded expression. “Still?” he asks.

“Against my better judgement,” she says, too lightheaded with his closeness to want to stop fondness from creeping into her words. He has stopped trying to deceive her; why should she try to deceive him? Or even herself? She’s loved him all these months, Madi realizes now, no matter how much she’s hated him as well. If she hadn’t loved him, their separation would never have cut so deep.

Silver’s hands flutter at his sides like he wants to touch her, and all at once she feels as desperate to be close to him as the first time he’d kissed her. When long hours of friendship and joint strategy and longing had coalesced, sudden as powder igniting, into reaching for each other in the dark of her bedroom. Madi smiles at him, now, and he places his hands hesitantly on her hips. She runs a hand along his shoulder, then up his neck to his jaw, feeling transported back into the memory of that night, feeling like this is entirely new.

Placing two fingers under his chin, Madi tips his face up slightly and—finally, _finally_ —presses her mouth to his.

As soon as she does, Silver comes alive under her touch, like he’s been waiting for her permission. His hands skim lightly up her sides, and his mouth opens eagerly for her.

 _Closer_ , insists something at the back of Madi’s mind, the part that isn’t sure if this is still a dream, that wants to touch him to make sure he’s real. And she obeys, surging into Silver’s space until she feels the warmth of his thighs on either side of her body, until she’s certain that anything this true and alive can only be real.

Silver groans something into her mouth that she can’t quite catch. Insensibly, Madi presses even closer, until suddenly Silver slips back, his forearms catching on the desk to prevent him sliding off of it entirely, with a gasp that collapses into laughter.

“Are you all right?” Madi asks, smiling, still pressed against him. God, he looks so wonderful laughing. Seeing the way his shoulders shake with it, Madi suddenly remembers that loving someone like this need not be so deadly serious. She and Silver don’t have to be a tragedy out of some old play. They don’t even have to be a tragedy like the very last time they tried this together. Starting over, she realizes, almost giddy with it, means that they get to laugh together this time.

Still laughing, Silver lifts an arm to show her: his forearm is covered with blue ink. He’d knocked Flint’s inkwell over when he’d slipped. 

“That will never do,” Madi says, mock-seriously. She presses a kiss to his arm, right where bare skin meets ink. 

A short cleanup, a long kiss, and several hesitant looks and uncertain syllables later, they tumble into the captain’s bed together. When Silver’s mouth finds hers again, all Madi’s dreams of him are changed from wrong to luminously right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [taps mic, leans in real close] madi and flint are drift fucking compatible babey


	5. XLIII

The day of the assault dawns like the inside of a lit oven, oppressively hot and dark with a rising orange-red sun licking the edges of the stormclouds beginning to boil overhead. James had risen before Thomas, who was still unused to the luxury of sleeping past daybreak, and snuck out of the men’s sleeping quarters belowdecks. He had spared a rueful thought for his cabin, which he’d stopped outside last night after hearing it clearly occupied. Earlier this morning it was empty enough for him to grab a clean pair of socks, but the desk was a wreck of mussed paper and spilled ink. Now James stands on deck, gathering himself for the day ahead as the ship rocks gently with the waves and the few men of the dawn watch go sleepily about their business. 

He’s worried. This was an uncertain plan to begin with, given that it relies on bluff, and now with the loss of Anders’s men they certainly don’t have enough men to face the Lord Proprietor if they can’t take him by surprise. Pity they hadn’t been able to convince Julius to join with them, but James hadn’t wanted to push. It was too much to ask Julius to trust pirates again, after everything, and if this plan works it will hopefully go some way towards repairing things between his men and the pirates. But that’s only if it works. 

Jesus, James wishes he has a backup plan. 

No matter what he’d told Jack about going back to scheming with the governor if the plan fails, James is afraid that there will be no negotiating if Berridge’s men ever set foot on New Providence Island. Berridge will leave the plantations too heavily guarded for future raids; he will bind the island to British rule more tightly than ever before; he will even, if Thomas’s assessment of his character is to be believed, likely use the treaty’s provision about harboring escaped slaves as an excuse to burn Madi’s island to the ground. There can be no failure today.

But the kind of worry James feels today is beyond the kind of worry he’d felt before everything had ended the first time. Before, he had had to worry about Silver and Madi’s lives, but was contented to throw himself on the pyre if that was a necessary sacrifice in the war he fought. Now, he had not only Silver and Madi to worry over, but also Thomas and, novelty of novelties, himself. 

A soft tap of wood on wood alerts James to the presence of a certain someone walking with a crutch behind him. James shakes his head. More and more, it seems that Silver can be summoned just by thinking about him, like some sort of demon attuned to his thoughts. Not that he’s complaining.

Without turning, James asks, “She forgave you, then?”

“No,” replies Silver simply. He steps up to the rail next to James and leans his back against it, facing the deck while James faces out to sea. “But she told me that it’s all right that she can’t forgive me, as long as we can . . .” Silver makes an odd little gesture, a flick of his hands that’s like an aborted shrug. “Tear up that portion of our history, I suppose. Start over and learn to trust each other from scratch.”

“And do you intend to deserve her trust?” James asks. He wonders if he could muster the ability to threaten Silver if the answer was _no_. Probably not, but he’d make an effort, for Madi’s sake.

“Yes,” says Silver. “It pains me that she chooses to keep endangering herself, but I’ll have to learn to live with it, if I want to live with her.” 

His honesty surprises James, and Silver must realize what he’s said, because he covers it up with a joke. “Jesus, every time she goes out, I’ll feel like a Navy wife waiting for my man to return from battle. I don’t know how anyone stands it.”

James huffs a laugh. “You’re gonna retire from all this, then? Cook for Madi like a housewife?”

“Fuck, no. I’m better at cooking than that first time I cooked for you, but I can’t say I've found my passion in roasting pigs,” Silver replies. “No, I think I’ll open a bar. Best place to get gossip that might be of use to Madi and our friends beneath the black. I’ll start my own little rumor mill, like Rackham used to have with his brothel. And, you know. I’ll . . .” Silver trails off. He sounds so vulnerable that James needs to know the end of that sentence, even after the moment passes and it seems like he won’t finish.

“You’ll what?”

“Be needed.” Silver’s voice is nearly inaudible. 

The bosun’s call sounds, reminding James unpleasantly that the battle is close at hand. James hears the bustle of men beginning to emerge from belowdecks, swearing sleepily at the bosun as they’re given orders, and munching bits of jerky and bread.

“And you?” Silver asks, his voice steadier now. 

“I’ll see this through,” James replies. “I can’t just live apart from this fight like I thought I could. Even if we succeed today, we’ll still need to do more work to free Nassau. Separate us further from England. Push the plantation owners off the island and free the men and women they hold.” 

“And then?”

“I’ll go where Madi needs me. Carry on the fight with her. She’s talked about contacts as far away as Spanish Cuba; I think that’s where she wants to go after Nassau. Help the maroon communities there take back what’s theirs.”

Uncharacteristically, Silver holds his tongue. But James thinks he knows what Silver’s thinking: grief at the thought of Madi and James putting themselves in danger again, relief that James is calmly discussing his plans for the future of their war rather than excoriating Silver over its past.

“Well,” says James finally. “All I can say is that I’m glad there was an extra hammock for me out with the men. Since you and Madi were so caught up in _learning to trust each other_ last night.” He turns to look at Silver, gratified to see that Silver has gone pink. Then his eyes flick down to Silver’s forearms, and _oh_. James would be lying if he said that the ink stains mottling Silver’s forearms didn’t make heat curl in his stomach. The same ink that had spilled on James’s desk, like Silver had been pushed down among it.

“Sorry about that. If you must know, I was only there because I was waiting for you,” says Silver, and _God_ , that wrecks any attempt at teasing, because that image is all that fills James’s head now. Silver, waiting in _his_ cabin, letting a slow smile turn his mouth into a promise when James opens the door, letting _James_ be the one to push him back against the desk until he’s desperate enough not to care if ink spills and soaks them both.

Silver clears his throat. “Waiting for you to talk strategy, I mean. When Madi came in, well. I apologize for stealing your cabin, but I was not about to interrupt when she seemed inclined to be friendly with me.”

James opens his mouth to answer, but God knows what’ll come out of his mouth. An instant later, he’s saved by the lookout shouting down from the fighting top.

“ _That’s Rackham’s signal! They’re coming!_ ”

—

At the lookout’s call, a stone settles in Madi’s stomach. It’s time. She’s up on the fo’c’s’le with Thomas, where she’s been letting him distract her with a rambling point about Herodotus’s _Histories_. She can tell by the uncharacteristic tightness in his voice that he’s as nervous as she is, but she appreciates the effort.

She likes Thomas. She’d never expected to—after all, he’d been an English lord, and no matter how far he’d fallen after that, the opinions of an English lord could hardly be expected to matter to her. But even if he’d started out as a better sort of English lord, whatever _that_ could mean, prison must have changed Thomas, she supposes. She likes how he listens to her, even when she contradicts him; she likes how he has a spine of iron beneath that gentle exterior; she likes how Flint’s eyes go soft when Thomas smiles, because any man who can make Flint happy is worthy of her friendship.

She likes, in this moment, that neither of them make any pretense about not watching Flint and Silver on the deck below. When the two men turn as one and straighten their shoulders instinctively at the lookout’s cry, Thomas shuts up about the Oracle of Delphi and the Persians and throws Madi a _look_. 

She acknowledges it with a look of her own—another thing she likes about Thomas is this, the way he reads those close to him as well as she can—then asks him, “Time to get below?”

“Absolutely not.” Thomas’s mouth is a resolute line. “I’m no safer there if they start shooting. I can be of help up here, with the gunners. And I need to be able to see _him_.” 

For all Thomas’s imposing stature and all she’s heard of his experiences, Madi worries for him. But he can make his own decisions. Flint had granted him that right.

Speaking of Flint—

He climbs the stairs to her and gives her a hard smile, one that transports her to every battle he’d planned and fought by her side, back when they had been two cogs in some deadly machine that devastated their enemies but might fly apart at any moment. “Five minutes before we’ll be needed,” Flint tells Madi in an undertone. “Care to say anything to the men?”

How like Silver he is, that there is much more meaning to his words than their literal significance. When Flint offers this, what he means is _I may command the ship, but you’re the one they’re following. This fight is yours_. Madi nods and moves to stand at the rail above the main deck, Flint flanking her, Thomas watching from behind.

The men are readying themselves below, some busy with the sails but most, because the crew has swelled to more than its usual number with members of the pirate resistance, readying the guns or standing in tense knots as they wait for the fight. Madi surveys their faces, fixing them in her mind one last time, refusing to forget them if they fall. She clears her throat, pitches her voice to carry down to them but not across the water, and says, “This is not your fight.”

Flint shifts anxiously beside her. Silver and the rest of the men on deck look up at her, surprised. No one interrupts. “This is not your fight,” says Madi again, her voice steady. “This is a fight for the pirate republic that your brothers fought and died for last year. This is a fight to finish what the slave uprisings started, before we were handed an unacceptable treaty. This is a fight to remove the foot of the British Empire from the necks of our children and of the pirates that come after you here. This is not your fight, but a fight for the memory of those who came before us, and for the lives of those who come after.”

Her tongue tastes sour as she hears herself centering the pirates and their struggle. True, most of them come from nothing and deserve to live free under their own rule as much as any man, but they chose this life. But what can Madi say? _Fight and die to remove slaveholders from the island because it’s the right thing to do_? These are _pirates_. She takes a breath. Looks Silver in the eye. “That is all.”

As the men turn back to their jobs and Thomas goes down to the deck to help them, Flint claps her on the back. “Well done,” he says softly. “I take back what I said about making a pirate of you. I know you’re always going to be more than us.”

So Flint understands, then. That there was more to her speech than what she had said aloud. 

As the bustle continues below her on the main deck, Madi peers out ahead of the _Walrus_. The ship still lies tucked into a cove behind the jut of Fort Nassau, invisible to the point from which the Lord Proprietor will enter and make landing. But at orders from Flint, the anchor has been weighed and the sails unfurled. As they lurch forward with the stiff wind, Madi can just make out the edge of the Lord Proprietor’s ship.

Her first wild, insensible thought is that it’s _huge_. If that’s what the back of the ship looks like, towering over the _Walrus_ with its name, the _Lion_ , written in flowing script, it must be a fortress on the water. God, no wonder James had said the guns would be of little use, that thing looks impregnable. Is it too late to try to back down, do this another way? A glance at Flint’s stony expression tells her that it is.

“ _Rackham’s blocked ‘is way!_ ” The lookout’s voice rings out loud in the tense silence. They must be past hiding from the Lion, then, as the _Walrus_ begins to round the fort into open view.

And indeed, the newly-christened _Revenge_ is pulled right in the middle of the deep-water channel leading to the shore, standing in the way of the larger ship. Hands aboard the _Lion_ frantically stow the sails, trying to drop its already reduced speed to avoid the nimbler _Revenge_ without running aground in the shallow water around the channel. As the _Lion_ flails, the _Revenge_ raises the black: Rackham’s skull and crossed swords and, beneath it, the skeleton and bloody heart of Edward Teach.

_What_? But there he is, Madi sees as she squints at the _Revenge_ ’s fo’c’s’le: someone looking just like Teach standing next to Rackham and Bonny, the three of them posed to be recognized against the rail. Seems that Flint wasn’t the only captain brought back from the dead.

Silver’s voice rings out with a command. “ _Raise the black!_ ” Madi’s eye catches on him as he turns his face up to Flint, as if to confirm that he’s allowed to give that order. Flint nods, once, and in the light of that nod Silver looks like a pirate king once more. Gone is the bitter, bruised man who hid in the outlaw town for months, pulling strings behind the scenes and afraid to step into the light. Silver sets his shoulders, a pillar against the chaos of men rushing to their battle stations around him, then starts up the narrow stairs to her and Flint. 

They’re almost upon the _Lion_ to pin it between their ship and the _Revenge_ , coming at the big British ship at a right angle to keep all but the wildest of cannon shots from reaching them. As the black flag goes up, Madi, Flint, and Silver take up their positions side by side before the prow. Madi ignores the heavy weight in her stomach, the weight that tells her how exposed and fragile she is up here, and tries to look imposing. Silver must feel the same, because he mutters, “Anyone on that ship decides the world is better off without us three, and we’re all fucking dead.” 

Flint ignores him, studying the enemy ship’s deck. “If he’s going to surrender, it’ll be now. But prepare the men to take fire.” Behind them, Madi can hear Rowley repeat the order, but all her attention is on the enemy ship. The deck is crawling with men, heaving knots of them that make her stomach whirl to watch them, though it is fewer men than Madi would have thought to crew such a ship.

From this close, Madi can lock eyes with the captain of the _Lion_. Can watch his mouth shape the word _Fire_.

The thunder of the great guns is almost deafening as shot smashes into the hull of the _Walrus_ , but Madi and the men at her side are already moving. They scramble down to the main deck, Flint first. The next second another shock shudders through the _Walrus_ ’s timbers, and for a confused half-breath Madi thinks they’ve somehow already gotten another shot off, until she realizes the two ships have collided.

Once all their boots are more solidly planted on the deck, Flint whirls to face Rowley. “Is the _Lion_ aground yet?”

“Yep,” Rowley answers. He’s wound tight as a bowstring, his hand on the sword hilt at his side. “The impact pushed ‘er tail into the shallower water, I’d wager she’s stuck.”

“Good. Bring us about. We’re going to board her at the starboard side.”

Flint’s face betrays nothing as he slips back into the skin of the pirate captain, but Madi can see that his gaze catches on Thomas, crouched by the port side gunners to help, and Silver, standing at Flint’s side. Then, suddenly, Flint is in motion, and Madi feels herself moving too.

As the _Walrus_ comes around the struggling _Lion_ , Madi takes up her position, feeling the pull of Flint and Silver on her like a tether that binds them up together as they move in counterpoint. Flint stalks the deck, calling out orders to the helmsman and the men adjusting the sails, while Silver exhorts the boarding party over to the rail. As men whirl and shout around her, Madi plants herself like a rock, heading the line of musketmen and feeling all their men’s faces turn toward her for reassurance. As they work, so attuned to each other that they barely need to look at each other, Silver’s and Flint’s faces are alight with something Madi feels burning inside her as well. Madi feels like one aspect of some three-headed god of war, the three of them terrifying and righteous and _beautiful_.

There’s a brief, tense window in which the Lion has a completely clear shot at them. Flint screams out, “ _Prepare to take fire!_ ” But Rackham’s ship must be harrying the _Lion_ ’s other side as planned, because only a few of the great guns go off. 

Madi’s ears ring regardless, and she scans the deck. One man down, some debris, but _good_ , that’s all the damage immediately visible. She finds Thomas’s face among the men, white but otherwise all right. But—

_God, where’s Silver_? Madi’s heart is in her mouth as her gaze flicks wildly around the men’s faces. There: the long hair, the fierce grin aimed at her. She settles. She can face this, if he’s all right. 

The next second, they’re upon the _Lion_. It’s no less terrifying for having run aground; if anything, it’s even more like a mountain, looming stock-still beside them as its timbers groan like a waking giant. Every time a shot rings out from the ship, the lead weight of terror in her stomach drags her down further.

But the men are looking to her. She cannot falter now. As the vanguard swarms up ladders to the bigger ship, as she hears cannonfire and shouts from the _Revenge_ on the _Lion_ ’s other side, Madi hefts her musket to her shoulder and fires. An instant later, bangs and the acrid smell of gunpowder fill the air around her as the other men do the same.

Because of the _Lion_ ’s size, Madi and the other marksmen have few clear shots. But Madi chooses her shots carefully, aiming for the men visible over the _Lion_ ’s rail as they try to repel the _Walrus_ men. A bear of a man hacking at the _Walrus_ men’s ladders goes down with one of Madi’s bullets in his shoulder, and grim satisfaction floods through her as she reloads.

Once the vanguard has made it onto the _Lion_ , there’s a helpless minute where Madi can’t see anything, can’t do anything to help, can only lock eyes with Silver and breathe hard into the stillness of the _Walrus_ as the lookout calls down from the fighting top. 

“ _One man down!_ ” Flint’s shoulders are heaving beside her as he lists toward the _Lion_ , clearly itching to get aboard. He sets down his gun and places a restless hand on the hilt of his sword.

“ _Two men down!_ ” The lookout’s call makes Thomas’s head snap up, craning fruitlessly to see what’s happening.

“ _They’re almost to the captain!_ ”

At this last shout, Flint takes his cue to head to the rail. Unthinkingly, Madi follows, Silver on her heels. Flint turns back to them, concern etching his face. But he hands Madi a pistol. “Stay behind me.”

When the three of them reach the deck of the _Lion_ , Anne has the captain at the point of her sword, his empty hands in the air as she scowls at him. The few skirmishes left around the deck die down, the British troops dropping their weapons as they realize they’re done.

The very _few_ British troops. This fighting force was meant to take back Nassau from the scourge of piracy and raids. Weren’t there supposed to be more of them? Madi can see Silver’s eyes narrow as his gaze travels over the deck and then, warily, down through the grate at his feet. He’s thinking the same thing, she realizes, the weight sinking deeper into her stomach. But there’s no sign of any more men.

“Which one of you is Lord Berridge?” Flint’s voice echoes over the gathering stillness of the deck. 

“Me.” A tall, thin man with white powdered hair and an impeccable coat steps out from the cabin doorway. His hands are raised, but he looks far too collected for someone who just lost a battle. Alarm bells sound in Madi’s head, though with nowhere any more men seem to be hidden, she can’t figure out quite what is wrong. Flint must sense it too, because he mutters, “Stay back. Could be a trap,” over his shoulder before he crosses over to Berridge.

Rackham, who’s been standing over near Anne, falls into step beside Flint. Silver and Madi follow close behind. Up close, Berridge’s calm demeanor is even more at odds with his hands raised in surrender. He smells like fine tobacco smoke, an incongruously genteel smell amid the sour tang of sweat and gunpowder in the air.

Flint steps in too close, and Berridge rocks back away from him, half falling back with his elbows braced on a water barrel. Flint looms. “Do you know who we are?”

“Yes.”

Jack steps in as well. “Do you know what we want?”

“I can guess, but I don’t know exactly.” Madi’s palms are clammy with sweat. Why does Berridge still sound so damn _composed_?

Flint stares down this slip of a lord without blinking. “You came to see us off for good. We came to remind you that there’s no getting rid of us. The pirates. The rebels. Remember Woodes Rogers, Mr. Berridge? Remember how he tried to root us out, make this place into a good, tractable little colony? Remember how he gave up, how he lost his wife and is rotting in debtor’s jail as we stand once more on England’s precious island?

He leans even closer. God, Madi had known, in a detached and academic way, how this man had once cajoled and threatened his crews into insane deeds. But now she feels his influence in her marrow. “We want none of your men to _ever_ set foot on this island,” Flint murmurs, his words dripping poison. “Do you understand?”

But Berridge is _laughing_. Great wheezing laughs that chill Madi more than anything else she has witnessed today. “Don’t you see, Mr. Flint? Do you think this is all the men I brought with me for a ship this size, a task of this magnitude? Come, Mr. Flint, I thought you were smarter than this. I landed half my men last night. Nassau is already mine.”

The bottom drops out of Madi’s stomach. After all this . . .

But now _Silver_ is laughing, a quiet little disbelieving chuckle that lifts Madi once more. She turns to face him, but he’s facing the beach. “Is that so?” Silver asks.

“ _Yes_ ,” Berridge snaps. He looks unnerved at Silver’s expression, but he’s not willing to concede anything on the basis of a _laugh_.

“Then I suggest you turn your attention to the beach.”

As one, the five of them turn. On the beach, clearly visible not two hundred yards away, is a crowd of British soldiers, just as Berridge had said.

A crowd of British soldiers, dropping their weapons, surrounded.

In the throng around the soldiers, Madi recognizes Julius at their head, along with the governor and what looks like every person who fought with Julius and every pirate and civilian Nassau can muster. A wave of relief sweeps through her, and she feels lighter than air, hope buoying her as though it could lift her feet off the ground. The governor gives a little wave. Madi locks eyes with Julius and they both smile.

In front of them, in a longboat just below the _Lion_ , is a group of Nassau men headed by _Max,_ of all people. A man stands up next to her, wobbling dangerously in the boat, and shouts up to them, “The first advisor to the governor of Nassau would like it known that it is a crime under three different acts of Parliament for any man to land troops in a British colony without express permission of the colony’s governor. She would also like it known that if British troops sneak around in the small hours of the morning, it is little wonder if they are mistaken for an invading enemy. She and the governor will be meeting with the Lord Proprietor to explain to him how things are done in Nassau.” Message delivered, he wobbles back into his seat and Max grins.

Madi turns back to Berridge. He’s wrong-footed and pale and still backed up half onto the water barrels, but he keeps throwing shifty glances at his men on the beach. They’ve thrown down their weapons, but the weapons are still dangerously close to them, and they outnumber the Nassau men and maroons who must have taken them by surprise. Madi knows that if Berridge gets a clear word out to them, she will not like the consequences. She turns to Silver. “Do it.”

Silver nods and steps forward, getting into Berridge’s space, stopping with his head bent a few inches from the lord’s. “Maria Elizabeth Berridge,” he says, his voice dangerously quiet. He’s put on the voice of Long John Silver, but Madi doesn’t feel it like a veil between them anymore. She feels it like a sword they wield together. She thrills at his voice.

Berridge’s face snaps up a half inch. “ _What_?”

“Your daughter. Twelve years old. Big brown eyes. Lovely girl. And she sleeps just beneath the second window from the right on the top floor of your manor house.”

“How can you know that?” For the first time, Berridge looks truly afraid. The fear sets something ablaze in Madi, something that burns with a bright clean fire. _You threaten my island, you threaten his island, this is what you deserve_.

Silver ignores him, continuing his inexorable litany. “Cecilia Marlowe Berridge. When you married her, she wore three strings of pearls. She’s fond of riding in the path behind the old church. If highwaymen got to her out alone on the road . . . well. I’m sure it would look like an accident. Surely unconnected with your presence here.”

—

Every word out of Silver’s mouth sends another lick of fire through James’s veins. He was right, he was _right_ , Silver did have a plan, even though James is damned if he knows where the hell this came from or where it’s going. 

James feels Madi shift beside him, and turns to look where she’s looking. Thomas has just clambered over the side of the _Lion_ , and he’s throwing a conspiratorial look at Madi. As James watches, he winks. _That man is my relative_ , James remembers him saying. Of course.

Silver is spinning a tale to save them all at Madi’s request, in Thomas’s words. God, James has never seen anything so beautiful as the three of them. 

“Your father, Sir Henry Berridge,” Silver continues. “A fragile old man now, isn’t he? He was upset when you inherited a title that was not his, but you love him regardless. Think about them, Christopher. Think about everyone you love. I’m sure you don’t want their blood on your hands. But I can make that an issue for you, Christopher. In coming here, you have angered Captain Flint, you have angered the Princess of the Maroons, and you have angered me. My name is Long John Silver, and there is nowhere on this earth where you can outrun those loyal to me. If you do not leave this island, we would be only too happy to ensure that your hands are never clean of blood again.”

Silver’s face is alight with this, alight with issuing threats in his own name and the names of the people he loves. How is this man real? How has James done anything to deserve this?

“Call—” says Berridge hoarsely, his eyes flicking nervously between his bosun, who Cooper has at gunpoint behind them, and Silver. Berridge clears his throat. “Call them off.” Nobody moves. “Call them off, God damn you!”

“Stand down!” shouts the bosun. His voice rings over the deck of the ship towards the beach, like a bell tolling the death knell of Berridge’s assault.

The troops on the sand stop glancing at their weapons and, as if the air was let out of them all at once, hang their heads. 

Silver turns to meet James’s eye. There’s blood running down his face and a knife-sharp smile just below it, a smile that stops James’s heart and pulls him in closer all at once. He is the fire and James is burning with it.


	6. XLIV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Astute readers will notice that I bumped up the chapter count because the last one would've been long as FUCK if I hadn't split it into two. Remember when I said this was going to be 25k words and 5 chapters? That was a lie, oops
> 
> Anyway, this chapter is the end of the plot plot! Fluffy epilogue to follow. Enjoy!

“So I look him in the eye, and I _know_ he’s the thief. But I can’t just have someone grab him or it’ll look suspicious. And he looks right back at me, and gives this cheeky little smirk, and jumps right over the side.” James pauses to take a swig of his rum, suppressing a laugh at the memory of Silver’s face, and finishes, “And then one of the crew goes ‘Jesus, that boy must really want to get laid.’”

Thomas lets out an undignified explosion of laughter, Madi giggles, and Silver puts a hand to his face in mortification. James feels laugher bubbling up in him, warming him as much as the rum. A victory in battle, the people he loves, and a good story—this is as good a night as he can remember.

It’s several hours after dark, and it’s the first genuine rest any of them have had since this morning. The day stretched out long, though with many moments that shine like jewels in James’s memory: Madi’s face as she learns that the planters will be leaving the island, bankrupt, after investing in Berridge’s failure; Max’s victorious smile as she threatens the Lord Proprietor oh-so-politely into signing over as much power as is in his hands; Thomas pressing his hand as Silver and Madi kiss after the triumph of the battle. 

Now, the beach near Nassau port is lit up and down with bonfires big and small as island residents, pirates, and Maroons alike celebrate their victory. Drunken singing, loud voices, and hearty laughter float towards the fire around which James, Madi, Thomas, and Silver sit at the edge of the merrymaking. A few yards away, James can see the governor, his eyes crinkling on a laugh, as Jack Rackham looks mock-offended beside him and Anne Bonny slouches, smiling, against Max’s chest on the sand. Mary Read, across the fire them, has divested herself of the false beard she’d worn as the spectre of Teach that morning, but she’s kept his signature tricorn hat. It perches on her head at a dangerous angle as she grins tipsily at Rackham.

But James only has eyes for his little group. He lets Thomas lean back against him as they sit together, watches with an inward smile as Silver and Madi’s knees knock together where they sit cross-legged, and hears Madi ask, “And that was the first time you met?”

“It was,” James affirms. 

“How undignified a beginning for a fearsome pirate partnership,” says Thomas, teasing. James can feel the reverberations in his chest when Thomas speaks. It’s still so achingly good to be close to him. He lets a hand trail down Thomas’s upper arm, nestling it at the crook of his elbow. Just holding on to him.

“Somehow I was a lot younger then.” Silver ducks his head, but his smile is good-natured. “Even though it was less than two years ago.”

“I cannot imagine you seeming young,” Madi murmurs. Her face is turned up to Silver, glowing in the firelight. When he looks at her, there’s something soft and intimate that passes between them that makes James feel like an intruder. He drops his gaze to Thomas, who places a warm hand on his leg as Madi and Silver begin to talk between each other in low tones.

“How are you, my love?” James asks lowly. 

From what James can see of his face at this angle, Thomas is smiling and pink-cheeked with rum. “Wonderful,” he says. “I have you, them, this island, the night. A victory. Freedom. I do not know what else I could want.”

“That’s for tonight, then.” James tips the side of his head gently into Thomas’s, feeling a soft smile spreading across his own face. “How about the rest of our lives? How will you be then?”

The question is teasing, lovers’ nonsense of the sort James hasn’t been able to indulge in since London, but Thomas pauses, seeming to consider the question. “I will be wonderful then too,” he replies eventually, “if the rest of our lives are filled with nights like tonight.”

“What, half-drunk bonfires?” James asks, still teasing. He wraps an arm tighter around Thomas’s chest, feeling the warmth of him through the soft linen, then lifts his head to look at Silver and Madi. Madi’s smile is sweet, and Silver . . . God. How is this man, this man with a hesitant hand on Madi’s knee and his eyes open and honest, the same as the bloodied, triumphant pirate James had seen today?

“No, you,” says Thomas again. “Them.” He waves his cup at Silver and Madi, then cranes his head up to look at James. James knows his expression is much too soft as he looks at the two of them, that Thomas must see this. But Thomas only gives a knowing little chuckle and presses a quick kiss to his jaw. “This island. A victory. Freedom.”

“What victories do you see in our future?” James asks. 

“Madi wants to keep fighting. You want to go with her,” Thomas replies simply. 

“I—” James hesitates. “I do, and I don’t. I don’t have another war in me, so this must be hers now. But you were right, when you told me I was still Flint. I can’t lay this aside either. I’ll go with her, and I’ll help her, and I’ll fight with her, but I can’t do that all the time. I’ll need to come home to you.”

“What if I want to go with you?” Thomas asks. James has no idea if he’s serious. A few weeks ago, he’d have laughed, but now he’s seen Thomas calm and efficient even in a battle he’s nowhere near prepared for. And—James glances at Madi once more—he knows the danger of taking a fight from someone who wants it.

“Then you’ll have to let me teach you to fight,” James replies. “I’ll corrupt you like I did Madi, make you a pirate just like us.”

Thomas laughs. “And what if I want to stay in Nassau and help from here? Help the governor gain more separation from England? I haven’t used my political skills in years, it could be fun.”

“Then I’ll bring you something every time I return from the sea.”

James lets his hand trail down Thomas’s chest toward his hip, the slow progress of his fingertips raising a pleasurable shiver from Thomas. It seems to spread through his body into James, who begins to think idly of making up for the night they’d lost to his stolen cabin yesterday. _Christ_ , it was so good when Thomas pinned him to the cabin door aboard the _Ladysmith_ those months ago, maybe tonight, after today’s battle—

A sudden movement across the fire makes James lift his eyes to Silver once more. Silver’s eyes have caught on the progress of James’s hand towards Thomas’s hip, and his expression is _hungry_. 

James feels that gaze warmer than the heat of the fire or the rum, as warm as Thomas’s hand on his thigh. 

“And what will you bring him?” Thomas asks, so soft James barely hears.

James’s tongue feels too big for his mouth, all of a sudden. “What?” 

“Will you bring Silver something from the sea as well? If he stays here?”

“I—” James flounders. He can’t think with those blue eyes still on him, with Thomas bringing a hand to his to gentle him. “I haven’t—” _Talked to him about much more than strategy, than sentences spoken as if in code about our past. Told him I love him. Told him I want him._

“Well, you should.” James is disgruntled to note that Thomas sounds _amused_. “You should do whatever it is that you _haven’t_. I saw the two of you together today. You two were a terror to behold, in exactly the same way.”

Across from them, Madi stands and tugs Silver to his feet. James, feeling like Thomas has given him permission to look, watches Silver move in the firelight.

Silver turns to look at him. Looking back. He’s always looking back.

An instant later, James is shaken out of his spell when he notices the look on Madi’s face. Her expression is full of identical fondness and amusement as Thomas’s voice, as her eyes flick from Silver to meet Thomas’s gaze meaningfully. 

“We are going to go get some rest,” Madi tells them, favoring James with a little smile. “Thank you, for today.”

James grins back at her. “It was your victory. And well won, after the plan you pulled with these two.” He nudges Thomas.

A moment later, Silver and Madi disappear into the dark. It’s half sweet, half bitter to watch them leave arm in arm, but when James pulls Thomas into a kiss, everything melts into sweetness again. 

—

This is familiar: the way Silver’s bare chest feels against Madi’s own, the pattern of its rising and falling with his breath going from frantic to steady as he remembers how to breathe again. They hadn’t had enough time together the first time they’d fallen in love, but they’d had enough for her to come to love this part, the feel of his fingertips trailing lazily over her back, the way he breathes slowly into her hair before pressing a kiss there. 

This, too, is familiar, Madi thinks wryly a moment later: Flint’s name on Silver’s lips less than two minutes after Silver had made Madi’s own name into a bitten-off groan. 

She lets him ramble for a moment. She’s not really listening—God, she’d forgotten how he used to do this, talk about the most complicated of personal matters at times when she was not equipped to think about them—but it’s something about why she trusts him now, whether Flint might do the same after today, after this battle.

Then she cuts him off. “John Silver.” The words come out in a sleepy rumble against his skin. “Do you hear yourself?”

“What?” he asks, stymied in the middle of his rumination on Flint’s expressions after the battle today.

“You have brought Captain Flint into bed with us. Once again.”

Madi lifts her face up to his to look at him. He blinks. “What do you mean, _once again_?”

Madi remembers the last time she tried to talk about this with him, bringing it up obliquely in the hope that he would come to it on his own. But Silver had been unwilling or unable to do so, obsessing over Flint’s intentions without seeming to realize what they meant to him. So Madi decides that directness is the best option. “I know you love me,” she says, smoothing a hand over his hair to settle him. “I know you did this for me, planning this battle for Nassau, for the safety of my island. But I also know you did it for him.”

“Hold on a second—” Silver starts, but she keeps going.

“It does not matter to me that you did it for him. Well, it does matter—I am _glad_ , John Silver. I am glad that you wanted to make peace with him the way you did with me. I just want to know”—she holds his gaze steady now, tipping his chin up with her fingers to keep him looking at her—“whether you are ready to listen when I tell you that it does not matter to me that you want him.”

Silver’s mouth hangs open a moment longer. Then it closes. And it stays closed for another minute, a minute that Madi measures out by the beat of his heart against her chest.

When the minute is up, what comes out of Silver’s mouth is not a denial. It is simply an infinitely soft, almost coded admission: “It doesn’t?”

“It doesn’t. I swear to you.” And it’s true. Madi has known this was coming for almost as long as she has known Silver. It can hardly bother her now, now that it’s coming to the light. “Are you going to do anything about it?”

“I don’t—” Silver swallows. “I don’t know. Would he—do you think he—”

“I do,” Madi says, amused. John Silver, lost for words. 

He seems to be able to put a few words together at last, and suddenly he looks stricken. “You know I love you,” he says, the words coming out in a rush. “You know this doesn’t change—”

“Shh. I know.” Madi lets him kiss her once, softly. “You can talk of him to me, I do not mind. You loved me so much even a year ago, and I know you loved him even then.”

“I did,” Silver says slowly, wondering. His eyes go faraway, and Madi wants to ask him what he’s remembering. She will, one day, but right now this can just be for him. “Jesus. I don’t know when it started, but I did. I just wanted to be close to him, you know? In every way possible.”

A moment later, he pulls her tighter against him again. “You too,” he says into her hair. “Taking that ship today with you . . .” 

She laughs slightly. “So you’ve said,” she tells him, teasing. He’s already made it clear to her, very enthusiastically, what he thought of getting to deliver her judgement to Berridge today, to speak threats in her words for the safety of their two islands. 

He laughs with her. “I suppose I have. But while we’re confessing things . . . do you know when I knew I loved _you_?”

“The moment I told my mother not to kill you?” she asks, half-teasing in the way only those who have survived worse than her mother can.

“I’m grateful for that,” Silver tells her with a wry smile, “but no. It started when you took my hand and told me what you knew of wearing a crown like mine. And it finished the first time I made you laugh.” She glows warm at the memory of that, a day they’d sat in the sun outside her home together and he’d made a daring joke about her royal bearing that had startled a laugh out of her. It makes sense that that was when he’d finished falling, because that was when she’d started, when she’d started seeing him as a man and not a pirate king. “You’re the best leader I know, Madi. And the best woman by far. And that was when I knew you were both.”

He shifts his leg where hers is thrown over it a minute later, a startled groan escaping him. “All right,” he says. “All this talk of love distracted me from you making my leg fall asleep. Shove over, I can’t afford to lose this one too.”

Madi lets him push her away and then pull her close again beside him, and she slips into the darkness of sleep curled up into his chest.

—

Madi is so used to waking up to shouting from the men of Rackham’s crew or to pains from sleeping on the hard benches where she bedded down during her travels that more than anything else, it’s the comfort and quiet that startles her awake.

She opens her eyes just a hair, letting the few rays of dawn light that enter the room clear away the fog of sleep. More awake now, she lets her gaze travel the room. Though Silver’s little place in the outlaw town is designed for barest practicality, more to keep the rain off than for any measure of real coziness, the bed is surprisingly comfortable.

A breath ghosts over her skin and she looks down. Silver is nestled into her side, still asleep, and Madi smiles to herself. She’s loved him like this since they were first together, when he still kept his guard up around her some of his waking hours but couldn’t keep from dropping all pretenses and clinging to her in his sleep. Madi lets the moment hang, basking in the stillness a little longer, then regretfully eases his arm off of her.

Silver stirs sleepily as she sits up to pull her trousers on. “Wha’s happ’ning?” he asks blearily, opening his eyes. 

“Nothing,” she says gently, torn between wanting to speak to him and wanting to let him rest. “But I have to go. I must go back to my mother, to let her know how yesterday went. That we will be all right.”

Silver blinks a few times, propping himself up on an elbow to look at her. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“It’s all right. I should talk to her alone.”

His expression flickers, like he’s wondering if he should be hurt by this, before he can school his features into stoicism. Before the veil between them can go back up, she bends to kiss his forehead. “It’s all right. Truly. I love you, I just have to go alone.” Silver’s expression goes back to himself again, his face turned up to her like she’s the sky.

“And I love you,” he says, settling again. “I’ll be here when you’re back.”

“Don’t be,” she says, letting some mischief creep into her voice. “There’s no need for you to hide out here anymore. Especially not from Flint. Either find him, or at least find a nicer room in town.”

Silver lets out a short, surprised laugh. “I’ll think about it. Safe travels.”

A few minutes later, Madi’s meeting Julius at the water’s edge. Once she’s settled into one of the few little periaguas that will carry him and his men back to her island, she lets her gaze track out over the water. It’s a brisk day, the heat from a cloudless sunny day cut by a stiff wind that’ll bring her home by early afternoon. 

A few hours, she hopes, will be enough to find the words she needs to say to her mother. All the time in the world won’t make this any less difficult for her mother to hear, but the right words will ease the way.

When they’re underway, Julius settles beside her.

“Thank you,” Madi tells him, still looking at the sea. “For coming back.”

Julius shrugs. “Some of my men talked me around. Made me see that that fight would be a way to free those on Nassau all at once, instead of piece by piece.”

“Some of your men?” Madi asks, turning to throw him a skeptical glance.

“And John Silver,” he admits. “He does have a way with words.” Julius studies the deck in front of him for a moment, watches as a few men call out to each other and adjust the sails. “We will have to act quickly in the coming weeks,” he says after a moment. “The planters will sell off the men and women they hold as fast as they can, to pay off some debts before they leave the island.”

“I know,” Madi replies. “I discussed that with Flint. He thinks it will not be difficult to free them, because the planters are scattered and acting with haste. And the governor will help us, he says, he’ll make the militia stand down.”

Julius nods and sits silent again. It’s not easy to talk to him, Madi thinks, it’s like he’s having a deeper conversation with himself than anyone around him will know. “I am realizing I do not know you,” she says into the quiet. Julius turns to her, his brow furrowed, quizzical. “Who will you be after the next few weeks? When you can stop fighting?”

“I am not a fighter. Really, I am just a very good carpenter,” Julius tells her, and in one moment, Julius the uprising leader, the raider, the peacemaker, has changed in her mind, gained a facet she did not know. “I used to make furniture, mostly, but all kinds of things. Instruments, even, for people who did not mind instruments that were fitted together in the same way as my chairs.” Madi laughs a little, wondering, and Julius gives a small smile in return. “What about you? What are you but a fighter?”

“I like to read,” she tells him. A truth for a truth. “My father taught me when I was young. I learned to read from his notes on the trade in Nassau, but now that I have other books, I prefer plays to ledgers.”

“Will you go back to that, then? Become a reader when you lead your island, when I am a carpenter again?”

“No.” Madi’s voice is soft. Responding more to the notion of returning to the way things were before her war than to the notion of returning to her books.“I cannot go back to how I was before.”

When they reach the island, Madi asks Julius to accompany her to see her mother. Surprise flickers across his features, but he agrees. Madi’s mother welcomes her with relief and Julius with grace and well-hidden surprise. She listens to them recount the tale of the battle and the state of Nassau following it, then tells them the goings-on on the island in their absence.

Since most of her talk is directed at Madi, Julius shifts awkwardly in his seat. Finally, Madi’s mother throws Julius a look that asks clearly why he is still here. He gets up to leave, but a look from Madi pins him in his seat. She laughs inwardly at this, at this battle of stares between a princess and a queen.

Madi’s mother sighs and asks, in low tones as if that will prevent Julius from hearing, “Are you finished now, then? Finished traveling and fighting, prepared to stay and to lead?”

Madi looks past her, out into the distance. There’s only one way to get out of answering a direct question, and it’s a way that she’s perfected from Silver’s example. With a story.

“When my father was alive,” she begins, “I know it was his word that governed here. Whenever you had something that you did not want to decide on your own, you got a message to him in Nassau to ask him to choose. But because you were here all the time, were the one who people came to with troubles or thanks, it was always you who people here believed in. Some of them, those who came here after the first group he spirited here, thought that my father didn’t truly exist. I even heard some of the children call him a ghost, since they were told he ruled this island but no one ever saw him.”

Madi’s mother gives her a _look_ , one that says, _Answer me, and do not test me, young lady_ , so clearly that Madi nearly laughs. Perhaps stories do not work on mothers, then.

“All that I am trying to say is, could we have that again?” Madi gets slowly to her point, feeling her mother’s questioning look, feeling Julius’s nervous glances. “One leader who works for our benefit beyond this island, and one who stays here to guard it? You asked for a leader whose focus is on protecting what we have here, not on fighting to bring our freedom beyond this island in ways that might endanger it. You asked for a leader who has experience in war, in case it ever makes its way onto our shores again. I can give you that leader, but until I am done fighting, that leader will not be me.”

Madi looks up to meet Julius’s shining eyes.

“A carpenter king,” Madi tells Julius later, when they are alone hours later. After she’d talked her mother around, after her mother had reacted with surprise that melted into grudging respect for this idea. After they’d talked details, how to handle those on the island who liked Julius for his dedication to it, as well as those few who disliked him for giving in and suing for peace. After Julius had gotten a _very_ stern talking-to about the real source of power under this new arrangement. After her mother had finally shooed Julius away to tell Madi what would be expected of her, and then, to Madi’s surprise, to embrace her and tell her how proud she was to have a daughter who would carry on the fight to expand the protections of her island to as many people as she could. “A great leader for an island like this one to have.”

Julius laughs. “Don’t tell me of _carpenter kings_ , Madi.” But his face is alight, and Madi knows his mind is whirling with plans for the island, plans that she cannot wait to hear. He’s a good man, Julius. “That is much too biblical for a man like me. And if you start calling me a king, that might give people the idea that it is really me in charge here. It will be you, wherever you go, and it will be you and only you when you return.”

“One day I will,” she says. “But not for a while yet.”

—

Inside block. Lunge. Step. Block. Attack. Reset.

Inside block. Lunge. Step. Block. Attack. Reset.

James is going through the simplest fencing drill he knows, the one his muscles could do automatically even in his sleep, just next to the treeline on the beach. A lantern lights his steps to his invisible foe as the sun finishes slipping below the horizon, turning the sky from deepest blue to black. 

Inside block. Lunge. Step. Block. Attack. Reset.

James is starting to get tired, but the drill isn’t wearing him out as much as he needs. It’s too easy, fighting shadows rather than a real opponent. No one to outsmart, not enough effort in the drill to quiet his mind. 

Inside block. Lunge. Step. Block. Attack. Reset.

James is panting as his feet shift and sink in the uneven sand, and he is not thinking about Silver.

He’s good at not thinking about Silver. He’s been doing it all day. He woke up at home and left for the outlaw town as Thomas made tracks for the governor’s office, and he didn’t think about Silver. He went to Nassau in the afternoon to find Thomas still busy meeting with Max, and he didn’t think about Silver. He’s here now, after stopping home for dinner, and as he goes through the motions of his drill he isn’t thinking about Silver.

It’s a good thing James is so good at not thinking about Silver. Because if he wasn’t, he would be dwelling on why Silver was nowhere to be seen in any of the places James visited today, almost as if Silver was avoiding him.

Hard block. Lunge. Step. Block. Particularly vicious attack. Step, step, _lunge_ —

“There you are.”

James turns as Silver steps into the circle of lanternlight behind him. Silver’s face glows warm in the flickering light, and all at once, it’s clear to James that what they’ve been doing all day is no different than what they’ve been doing for their entire relationship. It’s a dance, the way they chase and outwit each other, the way they get into each other’s heads. The way they step forward when the other steps back, turn into a step the other doesn’t expect, try to read each other’s minds in the ways they move.

No, not a dance. A duel.

James’s eyes flicker to the second sword he’d brought, a lighter one that he’d put down when he’d realized just how badly he needed to wear himself out. He keeps his face as impassive as possible, not allowing his expression to betray the way he’d thrilled to hear Silver had been looking for him—all part of the dance, all part of the duel—and says, “You were impressive yesterday, but don’t think I didn’t notice that you never lifted a sword yourself. When was the last time you practiced?”

Silver’s brow lifts. “It’s been awhile, I’ll admit.” James offers him the other sword he’d brought, hilt first. Silver takes it, drops the point to the ground. 

James steps back, making a show of readying himself, and after a beat, Silver raises the sword point again. James lunges, and Silver isn’t ready; his block is wild, and James’s next attack gets under his guard. The point of his sword stops a few inches from Silver’s throat. When James lowers his blade, Silver nods, conceding.

“You’re watching my eyes again,” says James, much more lightly than he feels. “I thought we broke you of that. Again.”

He begins to reset, but Silver attacks before he’s ready, his blade flashing in the lanternlight. James uses all his speed to parry, and they exchange a flurry of blows, quick as streaks of lightning as they step and lunge and leap back across the sand. This is so much better than practicing alone. With two, James can’t get stuck in his own head, because he’s so busy trying to get into Silver’s.

_Everyone needs a partner_ , whispers the back of James’s mind.

He falters, his front knee buckling slightly, and Silver presses his advantage. An instant later, his blade hovers over James’s heart. “You did break me of it,” says Silver quietly. “But with you, I can see the attack coming in your eyes even better than in your arm.”

That hits somewhere much more vulnerable than the point of a blade can reach. But James holds his gaze. “Again.”

It’s like their whole history in miniature, James thinks as they clash together again. Silver strikes and steps back in rapid succession, and it’s just like when he stole the schedule, a quick victory and a clever retreat. Silver gives up ground, his face knitted in concentration, and it’s like getting Silver back on the side of James and his crew in the Doldrums. James steps in toward him until they’re practically touching, the hilt of his sword locked against Silver’s as he strains to get Silver off balance, and there is no daylight between them as surely as there was none in the beginnings of their war. Anger turns into forgiveness turns into partnership with the flick of a blade, with a step forward or away.

_And there is love_ , James thinks with a savage strike, _or a strange form of it, in the way I taught him to fight, in the way we each stop our sword an inch before it hits somewhere vulnerable._

He’s so caught up in the tip of his blade tracking toward Silver’s chest that he doesn’t notice Silver’s hand come off his crutch just enough to press a short knife to James’s ribs.

James goes very still.

Silver’s face is tipped up to his, alight with victory in a way that makes James’s blood sing. It’s so, so hard for James to make himself believe that this is just a step in the dance, in the duel, and not kiss him even before he removes the blade.

And then the moment breaks, and Silver steps away. “I’ve never known,” says Silver conversationally as he tucks the knife back into a little sheath strapped along the length of his crutch, “why you fought like a gentleman even when you were teaching me how to fight like a pirate. Your back is so straight and your off arm stays back, even though you taught me to use my left arm to cover my front.”

James tilts his head. A question that perceptive deserves a truth, another step in the duel. “One part habit, two parts respect, I suppose,” he says. “I was taught how to fight like a gentleman, though I had to learn another way when I came to Nassau to go up against men I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw. I trust you not to hurt me for real, so for practice, I’ll fight you like this.” Neither of them mention the time they had fought to kill.

“Again?” Silver asks.

“Again.”

James wins the next two bouts with no more words exchanged between them. After another flurry of blows, Silver’s knife is at James’s ribs again. 

“You and that _fucking_ knife,” James growls, but Silver just speaks as though their previous conversation had never been interrupted. He’s braced against his crutch, leaning toward James to keep his balance, his face only inches from James’s as he keeps the knife between them.

“You trust me? Still?”

James sways toward him. He’s so close. “God help me, I do,” he tells Silver lowly. 

When Silver smiles, there’s no hint of trickery or manipulation, just simple joy at James’s words. He is luminous with it, James realizes, dizzy. 

This time James breaks the moment, stepping back before he does something dangerous.

“Again?” Silver asks. He sounds almost resigned, James realizes with surprise. As though he doesn’t want this kind of back-and-forth struggle between them, even with no stakes, but he will take this if it is the only thing James will give him. And suddenly, James remembers the times when their relationship was not a puzzle, a mind game, a battle. When it was a partnership.

“No,” James replies. He sticks the point of his sword into the earth and sits.

Silver throws down his knife and heaves himself down beside James with a groan. “Thank Christ. I was getting so tired.”

James ignores this. “You were looking for me today,” he says quietly.

“Yes.”

“I was looking for you.” An admission, freely given. And one that makes Silver look up at him. James can’t make eye contact with him, looks into the lanternlight instead. 

Silver lets him have this silence as his breathing slows to normal. After a minute, Silver breaks the silence. “This reminds me of that night.” Neither of them need to clarify which night; each other’s company, the flickering light, and the trees behind them are all too clear a memory on their own. James’s heart kicks up a notch at the memory of that night, at the thought of what it might mean that Silver is remembering it too, but he says nothing. “You know, that night I felt like I understood you,” Silver continues, his voice deliberately even. “Like you had given something up to me, and I had the upper hand. But I know now that that night, I was starting to understand something else about our partnership.”

James still keeps quiet, but he turns his face to Silver’s and knits his brows questioningly. Christ, Silver looks beautiful in the firelight, his blue eyes warm on James’s, his mouth turned into a serious expression that’s a lifetime away from the cocky twist of his lips that night that he told James _I will be your end_. James wants to get closer, but he’s afraid to break the spell, afraid that if he moves Silver might reconsider what he’s going to say.

And James wants him to say it _so badly_. Wants him to say that he loves James, wants him to use that silver tongue of his to smooth the truth, alchemy-like, into a much more beautiful story, and to make the story true. James wants to taste Silver’s truth on his tongue so desperately that he burns with it.

Silver swallows. “When we were working together for the war, I started to feel . . . protective of you. I didn’t know why, but I wanted to be close to you. And I let myself be convinced that you were doing something to make me feel that way, that you were manipulating me, that I had welcomed you into my head only so that you could destroy me. But it wasn’t true.”

“What _was_ true?” James asks. 

“ _This_ ,” whispers Silver, and kisses him.

_Fair enough_ , is James’s first, half-delirious thought. Perhaps it was too much to want declarations from the man whose apology was a mutiny, whose promise was a battle. But then the shock clears away and all he can think is _finally_. God, _finally_ , after months of looking and then looking away, months of letting himself touch Silver only so often, only when it would be acceptable—a hand on his shoulder when the ship rocks him into Silver, an arm brushing his when they stand resolute together before the men—months of wondering what Silver was thinking when his gaze lingered on James’s mouth, _finally_ he can have this. This: Silver’s tongue sliding warm against his mouth. This: Silver’s hand clutching harder against the back of his neck, like a drowning man clinging to his rescuer. This: James’s hand tangling in his hair, making him gasp, making the kiss feel as heady as winning a fight at Silver’s side, as sweet as coming home to Thomas.

James pulls back very slightly at that thought. Silver’s eyes are bright, his face a hundred times less careworn than it was a moment ago. “Madi?” James asks. He must be sure.

“She knew what I wanted with you even before I did,” Silver assures him, one hand trailing up James’s spine. James arcs into the touch. _Finally_ , he feels again, with every beat of his heart. “She wants this for us as well. I assume Thomas…?”

“Told me to get my head out of my ass the minute he saw us together. Not in those words, of course.” Silver laughs, and James is still smiling as Silver pulls him into another kiss.

God, how good it is to feel that smile against his mouth, how good it is to know in his bones that this is not part of the duel between them, that it can be a softer thing. That it can be just this: two men together in the dark, finding joy here after a thousand twists and turns.

Suddenly, Silver breaks the kiss and says, “Come home with me?” Once more, his smile is completely guileless, full of the same joy that James knows is on his own face. So James pulls Silver up to stand next to him and lets Silver lead him home, pressing up against James’s side all the way there in the moonlight.

—

There is freedom in the dark. James knows this.

But knowing it and experiencing it—those are as different as night and day. As different as having Silver’s gun aimed at his head is from having Silver’s hands trail through his hair as he pulls James impossibly closer in the dark of his cabin. As different as telling Silver about the freedom is from sharing it with him, from sharing something gentle and exploratory that spills over into clinging and desperate as the candle gutters out and James can no longer see him, can only feel Silver’s hands on him and give himself over to the sensation. 

The dark is safe, the dark is a place for monsters to remove their masks and turn back into men, to love each other where no one can see. In the dark was where he and Thomas first came together in London, where he first bared his soul to Silver on that hillside on Madi’s island. 

_But God_ , James thinks as he watches the dawn light Silver’s sleeping face a bright gold, as he shifts closer to feel Silver’s warmth against him in Silver’s narrow bed, as he presses a featherlight kiss to Silver’s jaw, _how good it is to be allowed to have this in the light._


	7. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I _need_ this epilogue to be 5k words? No. Did I _want_ to keep writing about four people who have been through hell finding purpose in their work and happiness in each other, because apparently that’s the only cure for Bad Quarantine Brain? yeahhh babey

There are two little houses just past the edge of town. They sit at a right angle to each other, nearly touching, forming a neat little square of well-kept garden behind them. It’s an odd way to build houses, especially when there is so much space around them, but the people who live there like it that way.

Depending on who you ask about the two little houses on the edge of town, you’ll get different answers about who lives there. If you ask the wrong people, you may hear that one of them is occupied by the owner and barkeep of the Rebel’s Wife Tavern and his wife, and that the other is occupied by a sailor and a man from the governor’s office. They’ll tell you that the barman is a great teller of tales (which is true), and that his wife is rarely seen because she spends her time tending the flourishing garden (which is untrue, for if it were so, why would his face light up on the rare nights she steps into his bar, like it’s been weeks since he’s seen her?). 

If you ask other people, people who are slightly more in the know, you may hear that the barman’s wife is the serious-faced woman who captains the trim sloop-of-war the _Scott’s Freedom_ that spends time in the harbor every few weeks. They’ll tell you that when she docks, she stops at the Rebel’s Wife to greet the barman before going home with the sailor to the two little houses (which is true), and that the governor’s man and the barman are the only two who can make the lady and the sailor smile (which is false, but barely).

If you ask the right people, though, you’ll find out a greater measure of the truth: that in one of the two little houses lives Captain Flint, retired from captaincy but not from the seas, with the man they say is his lover. That in the other, the captain of the _Scott’s Freedom_ , who was once a leader of the rebellion against Woodes Rogers, lives with her husband, Long John Silver himself. 

That is the most true of any of the stories people tell, but it’s not the whole truth.

—

There are some things about life in those two little houses that the neighbors get a glimpse of. (Madi chokes back a laugh as she sips water, watching James lunge to correct the way Thomas holds her practice sword in the yard before Thomas accidentally deals a blow to an indignant chicken.) (Out on the front porch, a joke from Silver startles a snort out of Anne, and just like that, the tension among them, Max, and Flint melts, and Madi smiles.) (Thomas walks home from town with Silver, and says something with a sideways smile that makes Silver huff in mock outrage and smack him lightly with his crutch.) 

There are some things that the crew of the _Scott’s Freedom_ sees, or knows, or guesses. (Flint takes a tiny, shining jewel to be exchanged, from the most discreet merchant he knows, for money to pay the crew’s wages.) (Silver comes down to the docks from the Rebel’s Wife to whisper something in Madi’s ear, and suddenly she’s turning with a grave expression to give the order to cast off as soon as they can raise anchor.) (Madi receives letters from a mysterious place off the island, and spends hours laboring over her responses, as though an entire people is depending on her.)

And there are things that nobody sees, except the ones who will never tell of them. Not everything need be a story, after all. Like this: the sailor walking the governor’s man home, the day they’d finished moving into the two little houses.

(“Tell me again what you think of them,” Flint says as he and Thomas trudge along the dusty street at twilight.

“Madi and Silver?” Thomas pauses, considering. “I love the ways that Madi’s like you, James, and the ways that she’s different. I like that she challenges me; I like that I’ve made it into the circle of people who she trusts. I like that Silver is good for you, and you’re good for him, and that no matter how much I miss you, he makes sure it’s never boring when you’re gone. But you knew that already,” Thomas tells him, looking up to gauge his expression, “or we never would have decided to live with them.”

“I know,” Flint concedes, “I just need . . . I need to know for sure, sometimes. That this is the life you want.”

“It is,” Thomas replies. “How can it not be? I can be of real use to people here, in a way I could only dream of back when my wealth and title sheltered me from their reality. And I have them, and I have you.”

A minute goes by, with just the sounds of their feet on the road, the sounds of the plodding steps and creaking of a mule and cart going past in the other direction, the sounds of a thought working its way slowly through Flint’s mind and onto his lips. And that thought is this: “They called you ‘Thomas’ at the governor’s office, I noticed.”

“Well, everyone I work with either knows who I am, or has no need to. I have so far avoided having to tell anyone my surname.”

“You could have mine,” says Flint in a rush. He turns to Thomas, looking suddenly guilty, as though he has offered too much. Something that cannot be accepted. But he continues. “McGraw, I mean. Everyone knows me as Flint here, anyway. And you could escape your father’s name here.”

“Thomas McGraw,” Thomas muses aloud, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Are we married, then, my love?”

This is not a story. But this is how the story would go, if this were a story: _Someone has to keep safe the name of McGraw, now that James McGraw has another name. Someone has to keep safe the man he once was, the man he still is. Who better than the one who loved Flint into being, the one who lost him and got him back again?_ )

Or like this: the redheaded sailor trying to find out when the barman had fallen in love with him, trying to sort the truth from playful lies as the afternoon sun casts bars of light over them through the slats of the bedroom shutters.

(“It was the first time I laid eyes on you,” Silver tells him solemnly, his eyes twinkling as he brushes a stray lock of hair from Flint’s face and leaves it to spread across the pillow.

“Now I _know_ that’s a lie,” says Flint. He catches Silver’s hand and fidgets idly with one of his rings, looking up at him to see the smile tug at the corner of his mouth. “That’s much too soon. Besides, I seem to remember I was covered in blood and lying through my teeth the first time you laid eyes on me.”

“Just how I like ‘em,” Silver teases. “But you’re right. Actually, I seem to recall it was when you were teaching me to fight. The way you moved, the way you looked at me . . .”

Flint studies his face a moment before responding. “Another lie. Wait, didn’t you say it wasn’t until after I’d gone away that you realized—”

“I know you like your books, Flint,” Silver interrupts, “but the moment a man falls in love need not be the moment he realizes it, no matter what the storybooks have to say about lovers. No, I may not have realized I loved you until you were gone from me, but I fell the moment you told me we were going to steal that fucking warship.”

Flint snorts. “I thought you were a better liar than this. I’m sure you wanted to kill me when I told you about the warship.”

“Only a little,” says Silver with a half-smile. “No, it was just one day when we were on Madi’s island. We were alone, and you looked at me like you trusted me, like you actually liked me, and I just thought—well. I didn’t think anything, I just wanted to be worthy of you.”

Flint reaches up to fit his hand gently over Silver’s cheek, dragging his thumb softly down towards his mouth. “That one’s true,” Flint says.

“It is,” Silver murmurs softly into a kiss.)

Or like this: the ship’s captain following the trail of maroons who’d come to her island to fight in her war but who’d returned to their home in the mountains of Spanish Cuba soon after, following them to offer her help.

(Madi bends over a table spread with maps of the mountains and the maroon _palenque_ tucked away among them, speaking in quick, terse tones with Flint. “Their leaders say they are well defended here, and here, but they are prepared to run,” she says as the candle in her cabin gutters low. “If we can just hold the militia off for a little while, more will be able to join them, and there will be no need for them to run. I just wish that we could offer them more than protection.”

“I wish that as well,” Flint replies. “But they’re so exposed, and you of all people can understand their desire to protect what they have without antagonizing the Spanish. Not everyone can want what the Cobre mines had. A victory here will look differently than the victory you helped them achieve there, but—”

“I know. I know,” says Madi softly, her finger tracing over an outline of a trap near the edge of the _palenque_ as she thinks. “What if we come up with a way to divert the militia instead of taking them head on?”

Flint nods, tells her, “Now _that’s_ a better idea.” He pauses, considering. “Jesus, I wish Thomas were here. Like that time we brought him to, what was it, that sugar plantation? He’d come up with some way to distract the governor. He’s wasting that diplomatic mind of his on Featherstone right now.”

Madi’s head is still bent with concentration, but when she speaks, her voice is firm, assured. “We’ll bring him next time, if he’ll come. But we can do this. We can help them do this.”

Flint gives her a quick half-smile, one that strengthens her with the knowledge of his faith in her, one that makes her lift her chin. He bends to kiss her forehead, not like a man bestowing a paternal favor on his daughter, but like a holy man calling a blessing down upon a king. “I know.”)

Or like this: the barman teaching the captain how to cook, taking any excuse to place his hand over hers on the fillet knife as they work, standing in the kitchen that nominally belongs to him and the captain but is often filled with any arrangement of the four of them.

(“I finally got to use the line today, by the way. No, like this—” Silver wraps his fingers more tightly around Madi’s on the knife’s handle, and together they drag it down over the scales of the fish on their kitchen table.

“What line?”

“You know, the _line_. There was a new man at the Rebel’s Wife today, and he asked me if I was the rebel, and I got to say—”

“‘No, I’m the wife,’” Madi finishes for him, smiling at him over her shoulder. Silver grins, and as she turns back to her work, he gives in to the near-constant temptation to press a kiss to the back of her neck. She gives a pleased little sigh and lets the fingers of his clean hand wander across her back and spread over her stomach. “Keep that up and I’ll never learn how to do this,” she warns.

“Hm,” he says in a voice that lets her know he’ll just save this for later. But he goes back to descaling the fish. “Is it funny to you that I’m the one teaching you to cook?”

“What, because Flint needed both hands to count the number of times you almost poisoned his crew?” Madi teases. 

“Maybe,” Silver admits. “But you’re a _princess_ , and princesses should know more than the likes of me.”

“You know not to call me that,” she says, elbowing him. “And _princesses_ don’t have to cook.”

“Lucky that you and Thomas have Flint and me, then,” he replies. “Between you being a princess—ow! Fine, the rebel to my wife, or whatever you are—and Thomas being a lord, you’d never get anything done without us.”

She turns to smile at him again, but this time her smile is a challenge that Silver can feel in his marrow. “Oh no?” she asks, and he reaches for her.)

—

But the whole story is this: the four of them making a life.

—

It’s little wonder that Madi is exhausted, considering that the past weeks have been spent in skirmishes and tense negotiation on an island hundreds of miles from this one. But at last she’s returning after a measure of victory, and she finds herself speeding up as her feet carry her alongside Flint down the familiar path to the Rebel’s Wife. Flint aims a sideways grin at her as he matches her pace. “Good to be home?” he asks knowingly, and she smiles back. 

When she pushes open the door to see Silver pause in wiping down the bar to turn his face to her like a sunflower to the sun, when he gives her a smile that makes her rush to kiss it from his mouth—yes, it’s very good to be home. 

“I missed you,” she whispers against his mouth, letting her hands trail through his hair, across his shoulders, down his back. God, it’s so good to feel him close to her again; after weeks of being away, it always feels like returning home to a fixed point, an anchor, to see him again.

“I missed you too,” Silver replies with that soft, open smile when she pulls away. His eyes flick to Flint over Madi’s shoulder. “I missed you both, as always.”

Madi grins and leaves them to their own reunion, ducking around to poke behind the bar while Flint gets a welcome-home kiss of his own. She eyes a bottle of Madeira critically, before Silver pulls away from Flint to tell her, “Put that back, I’m making you drinks tonight.”

“Will you?” Flint asks, teasing. “Gonna share that brandy you liberated from the privateer we took, are you?”

“You _let_ me take it!” Silver protests. “But no, it’s gone. I promise I didn’t waste it on my usual clientele, though, I only served it to people who had good information on the Spanish Cuba situation. Speaking of which, you should know that Marianne Wilks knows—”

Madi and Flint groan at the same time. Too much time spent together, Madi thinks as she catches his eye and laughs. “No talk of business tonight, please,” she tells Silver firmly. “It has been a tiring few weeks. Let’s just go home.”

They collect Thomas at the market, where Silver knew he’d be after his day at the governor’s office. In the throng of the market square, Thomas’s greeting is more subdued than what Silver had been allowed in the privacy of the Rebel’s Wife, but he still has a brilliant smile for Flint and a hug for Madi. 

They emerge from the market with a fresh fish and some fruit for tomorrow morning, and Madi gives the array of different faces and stalls in the square an approving glance as they start for home. She likes what it’s become in the two years since the wealthy settlers have trickled off the island after the Lord Proprietor. It’s no longer the kind of place where any manner of person would garner stares, having once more absorbed the kind of commerce previously performed in the outlaw town. Rough-looking sailors rub shoulders with sturdy farm wives, former maroons, and local artisans and workers of all kinds. Madi smiles to catch sight of Max in her lovely dress buying a book from a seabooted pirate, and Mulligan cajoling a man in a fine woolen coat into making a purchase of undoubtedly stolen wares.

_Nassau is Nassau again_ , she thinks with satisfaction, _not itself and its shadow outside of town_.

She’d fallen slightly behind to wave to Max, but as she catches up to Silver, Thomas, and Flint once more, she hears Thomas say, “The last few estate holders are giving us hell, of course, but I’m working on them, and Max seems to have willing buyers well in hand.”

“Is this about the new cooperatives?” Madi asks. It’s a thorny legal problem Thomas had already been working on when she and Flint had put to sea weeks ago—some wealthy estate owners had left the island before selling their lands, and were doing their level best to keep groups of former pirates, maroons from Madi’s island, and formerly enslaved people from taking over the land for their own use. Madi likes those little communities that have sprung up on the old plantations; they’ve turned into lively centers of farming or trades of all kinds. “The landholders are still giving you trouble?” 

“Unfortunately so,” Thomas replies. “But an interesting legal loophole is on our side, and we’ve been working to convince the courts to see that. I’ve been meaning to ask you, though—if they fail to win their lands back through legal means, is there any chance they might try something else? Should we protect the new cooperatives in any way?”

The question, along with further questions on the needs of the new little communities, occupies the four of them the rest of the way home. When they arrive, they pile into the kitchen of what is nominally Flint and Thomas’s house, though the house belongs to all of them enough for Madi to pop into the spare bedroom to retrieve the clean clothes she keeps there.

As she’s pulling her favorite embroidered red shirt over her head, sighing at the feel of clothes not hastily laundered at sea, Silver enters without knocking, saying, “They’re bickering about who gets to cook for us all again. Remind me again why we decided to live with an old married couple who are appallingly in love?”

Madi turns to him, feeling his eyes catch on her bare stomach as she finishes pulling on her shirt, warmth rippling pleasingly through her at his gaze. “Because they love us as well, enough to bicker over who gets to cook for us?” she says. She mumbles the last few words against his mouth as he leans down to kiss her, and oh, as good as it was to kiss him in the tavern after weeks apart, this kiss starts something burning like a slow fuse under her skin. Madi nips at Silver’s bottom lip like a promise for later, thrilling when he gasps into the kiss.

“True,” Silver admits, breathing slightly harder as he pulls away. 

“Talking of all of us, or rather, _not_ talking of all of us”—Madi starts, aiming a wicked grin at him, her hands still on his chest.

“Yes, I’ll stay with you tonight.” Silver returns her grin, stroking a hand through her hair. “I missed you. As always. And besides, I’m not entirely certain Thomas isn’t pouncing on Flint as we speak, we’d best be careful going back to the kitchen.”

But all that appeared to have happened in the kitchen in their absence was Flint winning the fight over the cooking. He’s serenely chopping herbs from the garden when they return. Thomas, sitting at the table, doesn’t seem put out, and as Madi glances over to him she sees why—he has his nose buried in the book Flint had brought him from Havana. 

“Giving gifts already?” she asks Flint, as Silver sets up at the table to start rattling around with bottles, cups, and for some reason, a grater. 

“He charmed it out of me,” Flint says gruffly, casting a fond look at the table. “Had to get him away from this fish somehow. I’m starving, and he would’ve taken all night to cook.”

“Shouldn’t’ve told me you’d always bring me something from the sea if you didn’t want me to ask about it,” Thomas says, not looking up from the book. “You chose well this time, love.” He clears his throat and reads, “‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark.’ I haven’t read that in years. A Fair Youth poem, of course.”

“Of course,” Flint echoes, smiling at him. 

“What do _I_ have to do to charm my gift out of you?” Silver asks, busy with a lime wedge and the four cups. 

“Make a strong drink,” Madi suggests, peering a little dubiously into a cup. God knows what he’s making, but Madi could use it after the day she’s had.

“Ah, let him have it,” Flint says absently, turning the fish in its pan. It sizzles appealingly, reminding Madi how hungry she is.

Madi reaches under her chair and slides a soft package across the table. It’s a coat, in a handsome shade of deepest blue, and Silver’s eyes are wide as he unties its wrapping and unfurls it. Madi had only been mostly sure it would fit when she and Flint had decided to bring it home for him, but now as he holds it against his body, she knows it’s perfect.

It’s stolen, but then, Madi thinks, all the best things are. Flint and Thomas from out of captivity, this island from the British Empire. This life, going to sea to organize war and coming home to them and to Silver. This life that is all the sweeter for the feeling that she isn’t supposed to have this. To have _them_ , crowded into a little whitewashed kitchen, watching Thomas read and pause to declaim passages once in a while, while Flint adds herbs and vegetables with practiced efficiency and Silver clatters theatrically with whatever he’s making.

Madi loves to watch his hands like this, his strong fingers moving around the bottles with an almost unconscious flourish he’d picked up before he’d met her but perfected tending the bar at the Rebel’s Wife. To think that she gets to love this now. Not the things that had made her fall in love with him first, the way he stirred men to action or bent beneath his crown in the same way that she did, but the furrow in his brow as he concentrates on his pour, the note of exasperation or satisfaction in his voice as he tells her about his perfectly average day running a perfectly normal business.

Well. Perfectly average for a strange value of average, Madi supposes, a value that allows for the staggering flow of secrets and information through Silver’s tavern and into her ears. But average enough to suit him, and their whole strange little quartet.

Silver has finished fussing around with his bottles at last, and slides four full cups of some dark brown liquid across the table. “Lady and gentlemen,” he says, pausing theatrically while Flint sighs at him, “I give you the newest drink down at the tavern, the Good Ship Freedom.”

Madi takes one and sniffs at it. It smells earthy, with lime and a hint of spice. “Naming it after my ship won’t make up for stealing that brandy,” she tells him, mock-serious. He raises his hands with a grin that says _Well, I tried_ , and she takes a sip. The citrus bursts over her tongue first, followed by syrupy ale and finished with nutmeg. Strange, but not half bad, she decides.

Thomas aims a half smile at Silver as Madi reaches for the lime to add some, and says, “Don’t give him too much credit anyway, it’s just a rum Rattle-Skull with a little molasses.”

“Jesus,” groans Flint. “Those were terrible when I was sixteen and they’re terrible now. Can’t I just have the rum?” But he leaves his post by the fish to take a cup anyway.

“I won’t stand here to have my drinks insulted. And these are delicious,” Silver insists, reaching for Flint’s cup to tug it away. Flint snatches it out of his reach, a momentary win for Silver, who continues, “They’re better than the ones I make for the Rebel’s Wife. I have to make those much weaker or my brilliant clientele will be throwing my chairs around after two.”

“Ah, so you’re just trying to get me drunk,” says Flint into his cup. His eyebrows go up after a swallow, like it tastes much better than expected, and Silver grins, victorious.

“Perhaps a little,” Thomas teases, laughing slightly when Silver toasts him.

—

And then later in the night there’s this: a rush of warmth that fills James as he watches Madi and Thomas, squashed into the larger armchair together and bickering good-naturedly about something related to food stores and commerce. James can’t bestir himself to keep up with them, wondering through a pleasant fog of sleepiness and alcohol why anyone would choose that as a topic of conversation just now. 

“Can you believe them?” Silver asks. He, like James, is sprawled on the floor by the crackling fire, his back leaning against the wall as he watches Madi and Thomas with fond exasperation. His leg is thrown over one of James’s, and the line of his body is pressed warm into James’s side.

“I can’t even _understand_ them right now,” James admits.

“Well whatever it is, they can bother us about it in the morning, if it’s important,” Silver says. 

James turns to him, watches contentment settle into the lines of his face. It’s a good life, the life the four of them have made. It’s so good that James sometimes can’t believe it’s real, not until he sees his contentment reflected on Silver’s face, or Thomas’s, or Madi’s. For them to be able to carry on their work, but to also preserve a measure of peace—it’s the life he would have dreamed of all these years, if he had been able to conceive of something between war and shedding the name of Flint for good. 

When James sees Silver now, he sees a spymaster who can charm and coerce and threaten information out of the most hardened fighter, and he sees a man who makes him terrible drinks and then kisses him when he’s tipsy and loose and smiling. When James sees Thomas, he sees Mr. McGraw, the man instrumental in Nassau’s independence and stability, and he sees Thomas, who grumbles and throws all his limbs around James when he wakes Thomas in the mornings. When James sees Madi, he sees her luminous and righteous as she learns to command a ship in battle, and he sees her easy and content discussing poetry in their parlor. 

Speaking of Madi—

“Has Madi asked you about coming with us next time we sail?” James asks Silver quietly.

“Yes.” Silver leans into the touch as James runs a gentle hand through his hair. “I told her I’d go.”

“Good,” says James, feeling suddenly light. “There’ll be no fighting this time, as I’m sure she told you. We just need you and your way with words.”

“So you’re going too then?”

“I am. I miss seeing you in action too much not to go this time. Although . . .” James lets out a slow breath. “There may be times in the future where I don’t always go with her. With you and her, if you decide you don’t mind going with her. I miss Thomas too, those times he doesn’t come with us.”

Silver nods, lets his head fall to rest on James’s shoulder. He’s still looking across the room at Thomas and Madi. They’ve stopped bickering about politics, and, from what James can discern, have moved on to picking apart _La Galatea_ , which is spread in Thomas’s lap. “I could do that,” Silver says. “I don’t mind being Long John Silver, when it’s for her. Or you.”

A moment passes. “You’re staying with her tonight, right?” James asks. 

“Yeah. She has to go see Julius and her mother in two days, so. Tonight is hers.”

James nods. It’s just as well. As James watches, Thomas licks his thumb to turn the page of his book, and well. Thomas’s tongue flicking over his finger is more than enough to get his attention. After so many years without Thomas and without this between him and Silver, he’s still so _easy_ where both of them are concerned. 

Madi has fallen asleep in the armchair by the time dinner has been cleaned up and they’re ready to turn in. None of them want to wake her, so they decide to let her rest. Silver turns down the offer of James and Thomas’s other bedroom— “It’s not like my bedroom is far,” he says, regardless of the fact that James’s spare room is as much Madi’s and Silver’s as the room in the other house—and promises to return in the morning.

When the morning light trickles through James’s eyelids enough to wake him the next day, he untangles himself from Thomas’s sleepy, clinging grip and pads out to the kitchen. Silver is already there, prodding eggs around in a pan. 

“Morning,” says James, voice thick with sleep, and moves behind him to drop a kiss onto his shoulder. 

Time seems to stand still for James then, for just an instant. In a moment, he thinks, Silver will turn around and greet him with a smile. In a few minutes, Madi will stir from where she’s still asleep in the armchair. In a quarter hour, Thomas will come in, just in time for tea, and the four of them will eat and drink and make sleepy conversation and listen to the chickens outside. And in two weeks, three of them will be back on the water to fight their fight again. But for now, James holds this one moment in his mind, preserving it so that it will glow jewel-bright in his memory. The future, with its promise of softness in this room and steel outside when he has need of it, will come. But for now there is just this: a single instant, full of the smell of cooking breakfast, the sunlight in Silver’s hair, the sounds of Madi and Thomas beginning to stir in the other rooms. 

And then Silver turns, and smiles a smile that James feels like the sun on his face, and time starts to move again, carrying James into his future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) I realized about halfway through this fic that I had more to say about maxanne, Julius, and Thomas in this ‘verse than would reasonably fit in this work, which is still essentially about how Flint, Madi, and Silver fit back together, so stand by for some companion pieces!  
> 2) Find out more about the fascinating history of maroon communities in Cuba for free [here](https://www.jstor.org/stable/25613434?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents), or unfortunately not for free (except from very good libraries) in [the book that article is reviewing](https://uncpress.org/book/9780807854792/runaway-slave-settlements-in-cuba/).  
> 3) Find out more about horrifying 18th century cocktails [here](https://drinks.seriouseats.com/2014/04/colonial-era-drinks-cocktails-rum-flip-stonefence-syllabub-rattleskull.html), and make your own Good Ship Freedom (actually, please don’t, I’m sure it tastes nasty as hell), a modified version of a real 18th century cocktail, by dropping 3 oz rum into a pint of dark beer, and adding juice of half a lime, fresh grated nutmeg, and a swirl of molasses. I imagine Silver’s were smaller because he’s, you know, not actually trying to murder his partners and his friend.  
> 4) Technically [the versions of the Fair Youth poems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Benson_\(publisher\)) that would’ve been around while Thomas was in school had their pronouns changed to female pronouns, but I like to think that it would’ve been Secret Gay Knowledge that they were originally about a dude. the gays would Know  
> 5) Thanks so much to anyone who stuck with this story! I had so much fun writing it, and you can find me on tumblr [here](https://minor-mendings.tumblr.com) if you want!

**Author's Note:**

> Comments highly appreciated, and find me on tumblr at minor-mendings if you want to chat!


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